"N 


v.. 


NOTES  ON  RELIGION 


BY  THE    SAME  AUTHOR 

Homeric  Scenes:   Hector's  Fare- 
well and  The  Wrath  of  Achilles. 

i6mo.        ::       ::        60  cents 


NOTES 


ON 


RELIGION 


BY 


JOHN  JAY  CHAPMAN 


NEW  YORK 

LAURENCE  J.  GOMME 

1915 


Copyright,  igiSi  by 
LAURENCE  J.  GOMME 

Published  October,  1915 
Second  Edition  February,  1916 


c^/Wfozs 


CONTENTS 


I.    The  Roman  Church 

II.    The   Effect  of   Hebraic  Thought  on 
Western  Europe 

III.  The  Indestructibility  of  Religion 

IV.  Memories  and  Half-Thoughts 


I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 

X. 

XL 

XII. 

XIII. 

XIV. 

XV. 

XVI. 

XVII. 

XVIII. 

XIX. 

XX. 

XXI. 

XXII. 

XXIII. 

XXIV. 

XXV. 


PAGE 


49 

60 
62 

63 
65 


Do  Not  Go  in  Search  of  Religion     . 
Teaching  a  Child        .... 

Institutions 66 

Many  Mansions 68 

The  Words  of  Christ  ....  69 
Modern  Science  and  Christian  Sci- 
ence    70 

The  Message  of  Christianity     .        .  72 
The  Mystical  Body  of  Christ    .        .  73 
The  Salvation  Army.  Tolstoi.  Nietz- 
sche      75 

Theology 83 

The  Love  of  God        ....  84 

Moods 84 


Horace 

Speech  and  Silence      .... 

East  or  West 

The  Porches  to  the  Temple  of  Truth 

Sacrifice  and  Burnt  Offerings 

Maxims    .... 

The  One  Thing  Needful 

Knowledge  and  Suffering 

The  Individual 

Mirrors     .... 

Deus  Absconditus. 

The  Contemplative  Life 

What  is  a  Religion? 


85 
85 
86 

87 
89 
90 

91 
93 
94 
95 
95 
96 

98 


NOTES  ON  RELIGION 

I 

THE   ROMAN   CHURCH 

I  STOOD  in  a  fertile  mead  full  of  flowers;  and 
I  looked  across  and  saw  an  old  city  with  its 
walls  and  battlements, — what  was  left  of 
them, — an  old  mediseval  city.  And  the  ram- 
parts of  the  city  were  broken,  and  through 
them  I  saw  the  gigantic  wreck  of  a  great 
church.  And  the  great  central  church  was 
surrounded  by  lesser  domes  and  naves  which 
seemed  its  offshoots.  There  were  many  of 
them,  and  the  plan  of  the  one  warred  with 
the  plan  of  the  next;  and  many  were  in  ruins, 
and  the  great  church  itself  was  damaged  but 
services  were  still  going  on  in  it  and  in  them. 
The  great  church  was  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  and  the  lesser  buildings  were  its  off- 
spring, the  Protestant  Churches  of  Europe. 

And  thus  standing  in  the  meadow  and  look- 
ing across  four  centuries,  I  viewed  the  Roman 
church  and  I  knew  that  all  those  intermediate 
walls  and  structures  which  had  risen  and  been 
demolished,   risen  again  and  again  been  de- 

I 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

moHshed  during  the  four  centuries  that  lay  be- 
tween my  own  time  and  the  last  fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire,  had  been  necessary  in  order 
to  give  foreground,  necessary  to  make  any  sur- 
vey possible  of  a  thing  so  vast,  so  familiar,  so 
universal,  so  intimately  a  part  of  myself  as  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church.  We  cannot  see  great 
things  while  we  stand  near  to  them.  Time 
must  broaden  the  moat  according  to  the  size 
of  the  castle.  And  this  cathedral  which  housed 
western  Europe  for  a  thousand  years  must  be 
viewed  from  a  distance;  nay,  it  must  be  seen 
in  a  perspective  that  shall  take  in  a  still  re- 
moter past.  In  order  to  make  any  guess  at 
the  place  which  such  an  institution  holds  in 
our  own  epoch,  we  must  look  backward, — 
very  far  backward, — back  to  Christ,  back  to 
Abraham  and  the  Mosaic  Dispensation. 

In  all  this  matter  we  are  dealing  with  the 
influence  of  Christ.  His  power  shines  not 
only  forward  down  through  the  centuries,  ap- 
pearing in  history  as  Christianity,  but  it  also 
casts  light  backward  upon  that  Jewish  history 
and  religion  out  of  which  he  stepped.  Christ 
himself  is  bigger  than  Christianity,  and  makes 
us  forget  it,  when  we  see  him.  He  does  the 
same  for  Jewish  History.  He  is  the  point  at 
which  the  two  met.  If  occasionally  I  shall 
speak  of  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  as  of 

2 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

a  single  Dispensation,  I  do  so  for  convenience, 
and  also  to  accentuate  what  they  have  in  com- 
mon. No  doubt  if  Christ  had  never  lived,  the 
Old  Testament  would  never  have  been  heard 
of  except  by  scholars.  It  might  perhaps  have 
exercised  a  literary  influence  upon  Europe; 
but  its  deeper  imports  would  not  have  been 
discerned.  Yet  now  that  we  have  read  all 
those  old  sacred  books  as  the  background  of 
Christ,  they  are  seen  to  be  a  part  of  him. 
More  than  this,  it  was  with  this  light  upon 
them  that  they  reached  Europe;  so  that  we 
may  say  that,  so  far  as  Europe  is  concerned, 
his  light  has  shined  through  them  always.  The 
Old  and  New  Testaments  may  then,  for  cer- 
tain purposes,  be  viewed  as  a  single  influence. 
The  chief  miracle  with  regard  to  the  older 
Hebrew  literature  is  that  the  books  should 
have  come  down  to  us  in  such  genuine  condi- 
tion. What  a  race  of  angels  the  old  Jews 
must  have  been,  to  preserve  these  volumes 
in  their  purity,  and  to  keep  them  open  to  the 
public  as  they  seem  always  to  have  done. 
There  in  the  temple  lay  the  great  writings 
from  generation  to  generation  of  Jewish  His- 
tory, and  every  scholar  had  access  to  them ; 
and  every  man  on  the  streets  of  Jerusalem 
could  discuss  them.  About  them,  to  be  sure, 
grew  up  various  schools  of  interpretation.   But 

3 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

no  one  endeavoured  to  make  these  sacred 
books  into  instruments  of  political  oppression. 
Or  if  anyone  did  so  the  tremendous  intellectual 
power  of  the  individual  Hebrew  soon  de- 
feated the  attempt.  The  Jews  were  a  race  of 
mental  athletes,  as  every  page  of  the  Old  Tes- 
tament proves.  Had  there  been  successful  tyr- 
anny, it  would  have  come  about  through  the 
growing  up  of  a  secret  priesthood  and  the 
withholding  of  the  Scriptures  from  the  people. 

It  is  a  strange  fact  that  as  soon  as  these 
Scriptures  became  known  to  western  Europe, 
as  soon  as  the  power  of  the  Jewish  Scriptures 
became  apparent,  their  serviceability  as  an  in- 
strument of  government  was  seen.  So  terrible 
was  the  power  of  Jewish  thought  over  the  un- 
sophisticated western  world,  that  rulers  could 
not  resist  the  temptation  to  use  this  thought 
for  purposes  of  government.  One  might  say 
that  no  European  has  ever  been  quite  able  to 
resist  this  temptation.  You  can  to-day  hardly 
find  a  Sunday-school  teacher  who  will  trust 
the  Bible  to  do  its  own  work:  he  must  pre- 
empt it.  He  builds  his  little  fence  about  it, 
and  holds  the  gate  himself. 

The  Bible  contains  a  summary  of  man's 
emotional  nature,  it  gives  a  sort  of  clue  to  the 
riddle  of  life.  The  ideas  in  it  are  few;  but 
they  agree  with  each  other  and  they  are  illus- 

4 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

trated  with  so  much  variety,  with  such  Hving 
power  and  such  miraculous  depth  of  thought 
that  few  minds  can  withstand  its  appeal.    The 
Hebraic  point  of  view,  the  Hebraic  concep- 
tion of  life,  expressed  the  spiritual  needs  of 
man,  his  sentiments,  his  aspirations,  his  rela- 
tion to  God  so  much  more  truly  than  any 
other  philosophies  that  the  Jewish  Scriptures 
for  a  time  superseded  all  other  learning  in 
Europe.     The  mystical  inner  logic   and  iden- 
tity of  feeling  (which  makes  all  this  Hebraic 
folk-lore  operate  as  a  soHd  unity  of  power), 
as   well   as   the   extraordinary   portability   of 
the  Bible   (which  can  be  packed  in  a  box), 
laid  western  Europe  at  the  mercy  of  Israel. 
Nothing  extant  could  resist  it.    Judaism  was 
destined  to  replace  other  religions  much  as 
good  astronomy  replaces  bad  astronomy,  or 
good   physics,   bad  physics.     The  popularity 
of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  made  it  necessary 
that  they  should  be  adopted  as  the  basis  of 
society.     They  were  at  once  put  into  service 
as  an  instrument  of  government, — the  instru- 
ment of  government  of  the  Roman  Empire. 

The  abuses  of  the  Roman  church  have  al- 
ways grown  out  of  the  necessities  of  govern- 
ment; and  they  can  invariably  be  detached 
from  the  Scriptures  upon  which  they  are 
founded  and  to  which  they  cling  like  lichens. 

5 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

I  call  them  "abuses," — one  might  more  prop- 
erly call  them  "uses";  for  they  were  simply 
devices  which  were  useful,  indeed  necessary 
to  the  church's  supremacy.  The  first  of  these 
abuses  was  the  incorporation  into  the  Catholic 
church  of  the  old  Roman  religion,  the  accept- 
ance by  the  church  of  the  pomp  and  ritual 
which  formed  an  historic  part  of  the  Roman 
imagination.  This  ecclesiastical  pomp  with  its 
elaborate  ceremonies  was  modeled  upon  classic 
tradition.  From  the  point  of  view  of  historic 
continuity  the  successorship  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  to  the  Roman  Empire  is  the 
most  interesting  fact  in  history.  The  old  Ro- 
man ritual,  the  Roman  spirit  of  obedience,  the 
Roman  worship  of  external  display,  and  the 
Roman  passion  for  universal  domination  have 
been  delivered  over  to  the  modern  world  in 
unbroken  continuity.  Yet,  of  course,  all  of 
these  things  have  come  to  occupy  towards  the 
modern  world  a  strange  and  incongruous  rela- 
tion. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  Biblical  history 
the  incorporation  of  the  old  Roman  religion 
into  a  theocracy  based  on  Israel  was  a  some- 
what revolting  piece  of  stage  work,  through 
which  the  mysteries  of  the  soul  were  trans- 
formed into  political  agencies,  and  men  were 
brought  into  a  superstitious  obedience.  When- 

6 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

ever  we  feel  impelled  to  condemn  the  Ro- 
man church  as  the  practicer  of  a  degrading 
form  of  tyranny,  let  us  remember  that  she 
is  merely  pursuing  a  course  which  she  en- 
tered on  in  the  fourth  century.  Her  officers 
cannot  understand  what  is  wrong  with  the 
practice.     They  know  nothing  else. 

One  cannot  help  wondering  how  the  Hebrew 
prophet  would  have  viewed  this  outcome  of 
Israel's  influence,  how  the  intellectual  per- 
son, Isaiah,  or  John  the  Baptist,  or  St.  Paul, 
would  have  felt  towards  this  outcome  of  his 
labors.  In  spite  of  the  extraordinary  grasp  of 
human  things  which  Christ  everywhere  shows, 
I  cannot  find  any  intimation  that  he  himself 
foresaw  such  an  outcome  as,  for  instance, 
the  Society  of  Jesus.  I  cannot  find  in  the 
Gospels  any  fear  of  political  tyranny  or  much 
interest  in  the  details  of  the  way  in  which 
spiritual  laws  work  out.  Christ  seems  to  be 
trying  to  get  through  the  day  each  day,  and 
to  deliver  his  message  of  the  law,  perhaps  to 
allow  the  law  to  speak  for  itself.  But  the  fol- 
lowers of  Christ  had  to  deal  with  the  cyclones 
which  he  had  brought  on.  These  forces  which 
Christ  somehow  released,  or  which  were  re- 
leased through  him  and  through  the  Jewish 
Dispensation  behind  him,  must,  it  was  felt, 
be  explained  a  little,  controlled  a  little,  and 

7 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

guided  a  little.  St.  Paul  therefore  inaugurates 
a  sort  of  metaphysic  and  a  sort  of  parish 
discipline,  both  of  them  very  mild,  and  on  a 
small  scale.  The  Roman  church  very  soon 
found  that  in  order  to  secure  obedience  she 
must  interpose  something  between  the  Scrip- 
tures and  the  believer.  How  else  could  she 
control  him?  The  exciting  power  of  the 
Scriptural  ideas  was  obvious;  but  the  direc- 
tion which  that  excitement  might  take  was 
very  uncertain.  For  instance,  one  common 
result  of  Jewish  influence  has  always  been 
to  arouse  contempt  for  civil  authority.  It 
seemed  like  dealing  out  firearms  to  a  mob  to 
give  such  teaching  as  this  to  the  people  at 
large.  The  whole  instruction  must  therefore 
be  manacled,  the  head  of  power  in  the  stream 
must  be  harnessed.  Out  of  this  discovery  of 
the  need  of  harness  there  grew  up  every  single 
one  of  the  thousandfold  dogmas,  customs,  rit- 
uals, exercises,  theories  of  conduct,  theories 
of  theology,  exposition  of  texts,  manuals  of 
devotion,  organizations  of  the  Hierarchy, 
rules  of  precedence,  spiritual  claims,  temporal 
claims; — also  all  relaxations  and  indulgences, 
all  exceptions  to  rules,  theories  for  avoiding 
the  application  of  rules,  alternative  practices 
and  inner  doctrines; — the  whole  incredible 
and  complex  metaphysic  of  government  which 

8 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

fifty  generations  of  Roman  rulers  have 
evolved  out  of  the  changing  needs  in  the  prac- 
tical government  of  that  great  machine,  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church.  One  key  unlocks 
the  rationale  of  every  Roman  doctrine  and 
practice. 

All  of  these  things  are  instruments  of  gov- 
ernment and  can  only  be  intelligently  con- 
sidered if  viewed  in  this  light.  These  doc- 
trines and  practices,  however,  are  not  acci- 
dental or  arbitrary  things;  they  have  not 
been  made  out  of  theory.  They  have  each 
been  developed  out  of  a  need,  evolved  from 
conditions,  distilled  by  the  natural  heat  of  hu- 
manity and  crystallized  in  the  natural  pressure 
of  events.  Every  one  of  them  is  an  organic 
product,  potent,  wonderful,  having  something 
of  magic  in  it, — the  magic  of  experience. 
These  instruments  of  government  have  come 
down  to  our  times  with  the  Roman  church: 
they  are  the  Roman  church. 

Let  us  now  consider  what  are  the  functions 
of  a  government.  Those  functions  are  to  tax, 
to  regulate  justice,  to  control  education,  to  set- 
tle the  status  of  citizens,  etc.,  etc.  The  matter 
of  taxation  is  vital.  How  far  any  government 
shall  go  in  taxing  or  in  controlling  men  is  a 
matter  of  circumstances.  The  Roman  Curia, 
through  a  policy,  which  as  I  shall  show  in  a 

9 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

moment  was  sound  worldly  policy,  has  always 
claimed  absolute  and  illimitable  control.  In 
the  gradual  loss  of  the  world,  which  the  Curia 
has  been  suffering  since  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury, her  attitude  of  absolute  claim  has  not 
changed.  This  policy  was  fixed  by  her  docu- 
ments and  by  her  practices;  it  could  not  be 
changed.  It  has  persisted  from  the  era  when 
emperors  knelt  at  her  feet,  down  to  this  day. 
The  claim  to  govern  is  always  the  same.  It 
covers  Life  and  Death.  It  covers  every  cir- 
cumstance touching  body  or  soul,  whether  in 
this  world  or  in  the  next.  How  far  that  claim 
can  be  enforced  at  any  period  has  always 
been  a  matter  of  circumstance. 

I  would,  however,  point  out  to  the  Protes- 
tant that  the  Roman  church  has  never  been 
fond  of  tyranny,  and  has  resorted  to  strong 
measures  only  when  compelled  to  do  so  by 
worldly  considerations.  Heresy  has  been  heav- 
ily punished  only  when  circumstances  made 
heresy  treason.  The  Albigenses,  for  instance, 
laughed  at  the  Roman  officials,  and  were  es- 
tablishing an  independent  civilization  for 
themselves.  On  the  other  hand,  throughout 
Catholic  history  persons  have  often  been 
allowed  to  hold  doctrines  which  were  funda- 
mentally at  war  with  Roman  dogma,  because 
the  circumstances  of  the  age  did  not  make 

lO 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

the  matter  into  a  political  issue.  For  instance, 
in  the  times  before  the  Reformation,  the 
Catholic  church  was  full  of  mystics  who  must 
have  been  condemned  if  they  had  existed  a 
century  or  two  later.  These  mystics  were  sub- 
stantially Protestants;  they  lived  in  a  union 
with  God  which  required  no  interposition  of 
the  church.  Their  immunity  need  not  sur- 
prise us.  We  all  know  that  in  ordinary  politi- 
cal life,  some  event  which  excites  no  attention 
in  one  year  will  raise  a  riot  in  the  next.  So 
it  is  with  the  history  of  persecution.  Perse- 
cution is  always  controlled  by  the  imaginative, 
political  fears  of  the  persecutor.  Severe  per- 
secutions always  represent  panic.  After  a 
split  has  once  occurred  in  an  organization, 
straws  and  feathers  become  symbols  of  the 
controversy.  Therefore  in  the  era  before  the 
Reformation,  there  was  greater  practical  free- 
dom, greater  scope  for  personal  feeling  in 
religion  than  has  since  been  permissible  in  the 
Roman  Church ;  and  anyone  who  wishes  to 
acquire  a  right  feeling  about  the  Roman  re- 
ligion ought  to  grow  familiar  with  the  Ca- 
tholicism which  prevailed  when  all  the  world 
was  Catholic.  Here  are  the  sources  from 
which  many  good  Catholics  draw  their  inspira- 
tion, and  their  piety  differs  in  little  but  name 
from  much  of  Protestant  piety.     So  long  as  it 

II 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

is  satisfied  with  the  practical  loyalty  of  its 
members  Rome  does  not  tease  them,  and 
has  never  teased  them  about  doctrines.  Doc- 
trines and  dogmas  are  put  forth  only  as  a 
means  of  quelling  insurgency.  After  the  or- 
ganization has  experienced  some  unpleasant 
internal  dissension  the  philosophic  result  is 
condensed  into  a  dogma  so  as  to  padlock  the 
future.  Thus  the  first  creed  was  adopted  by 
the  Apostles  as  a  test  of  loyalty:  they  had 
been  through  a  dangerous  disagreement  or 
they  never  would  have  started  a  creed.  So, 
also,  the  Nicene  Creed  was  adopted  in  order 
to  control  the  organization.  So  in  recent  times 
the  doctrines  of  the  Immaculate  Conception 
and  of  the  Papal  Infallibility  were  promul- 
gated in  order  to  stifle  certain  liberals  who 
had  been  giving  trouble  inside  of  the  organi- 
zation. A  dogma  always  shows  that  there 
has  been  a  tempest. 

Of  course  after  there  has  been  such  an 
unpleasantness,  the  embers  which  it  leaves  be- 
hind it  are  hot  and  treacherous :  certain  words 
and  names  have  come  to  carry  implications 
of  horror.  So,  for  instance,  the  term  quietism 
to-day  implies  the  most  dreadful  heresy  in 
Catholic  circles  because  it  very  picturesquely 
and  briefly  describes  a  kind  of  piety  which  was 
practised    with    impunity    in    the    fourteenth 

12 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

century  but  which  led  in  the  seventeenth  to 
serious  persecutions.  In  regard  to  Quietism, 
a  point  of  extraordinary  interest  was  illus- 
trated in  the  history  of  this  heresy,— namely 
the  point  that  the  church  itself  cannot  tell 
whether  a  doctrine  is  heretical  or  not,  until 
time  proves  whether  or  not  the  doctrine  leads 
to  the  weakening  of  the  church's  political 
power. 

The  Spiritual  Guide  of  Molinos  was  pub- 
lished in  1675.  It  contained  two  ideas,  each 
of  which  Molinos  believed  in  with  an  absolute 
faith,  and  which  were  nevertheless  in  the  last 
analysis  destructive  of  one  another.  The  first 
idea  was  the  idea  of  the  direct  union  of  the 
soul  with  God, — a  union  so  close  as  to  make  a 
priesthood  unnecessary, — the  second  was  the 
idea  of  the  authority  of  the  church.  The 
enormous  popularity  of  the  first  idea,  and  the 
spread  of  a  sect  founded  upon  it  seemed  to 
threaten  the  power  of  the  church.  But  the 
Inquisition,  which  made  a  formal  inquest  upon 
Molinos'  teachings  in  1682,  found  the  second 
idea  (the  supremacy  of  the  church),  so  faith- 
fully and  sincerely  upheld  by  Molinos  that  his 
Spiritual  Guide  was  approved.  As  time  went 
on,  however,  it  was  discovered  that  the  practi- 
cal effect  of  Molinos'  influence  was  to  weaken 
the  Papacy  and  to  create  a  new  quasi-Protes- 

13 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

tant  sect.  Molinos  was  accordingly,  in  1685, 
imprisoned.  His  subsequent  trial,  persecution, 
death,  and  defamation  form  one  of  the  worst 
pages  in  Church  history. 

It  may  be  well  to  note  here  an  idea  which  is 
inconceivable  to  the  Protestant  imagination, 
and  obvious  to  the  Catholic  imagination  and 
which  floats  down  the  ages  with  the  whole 
Roman  controversy.  Its  last  appearance  may 
be  noted  in  the  pamphlets  of  the  Modernists 
who  are  continuing  to  illustrate  it  in  Europe. 
The  idea  is  that  a  thing  can  both  be  and  not 
be.  The  good  Catholic  believes  his  soul  to 
be  in  direct  union  with  God.  And  yet  the 
church  is  between  them.  The  two  ideas  of 
Molinos*  contradict  one  another. 

Molinos  submitted:  he  was  led  into  the 
presence  of  the  brilliant  assembly  which  had 
been  convened  to  witness  his  humiliation,  at- 
tired in  a  penitential  garb  and  holding  a  burn- 
ing torch  between  his  bound  hands.  Molinos 
was  thus  true  to  his  second  idea, — the  abso- 
lute supremacy  of  the  church.  "Good-bye, 
Father,"  he  said  to  the  Dominican  who  was 
leading  him  off  to  imprisonment  for  life,  "we 
shall  meet  again  on  the  Judgment  Day,  and 
then  it  will  be  seen  if  the  truth  was  on  your 
side  or  on  mine."  Let  it  be  noted  that  the 
ceremonial   submission   of   Molinos  was   not 

14 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

like  the  submission  of  Christ,  or  the  submission 
of  Socrates,  or  the  submission  of  Gahleo — 
all  of  whom  retained  the  right  of  private  judg- 
ment and  submitted  only  to  the  punishment  or 
to  the  ceremony.  Molinos  submits  to  the  rea- 
son of  the  punishment:  he  recants.  And  yet 
he  appeals.  The  intellect  which  is  able  to  re- 
cant after  this  manner, — which  is  able  to  con- 
ceive of  a  thing  as  being  both  true  and  not 
true  at  the  same  time,  has  received  an  injury 
in  early  life  from  which  it  has  never  recov- 
ered. This  is  the  injury  which  the  Roman 
church  inflicts  upon  the  brains  of  her  adher- 
ents. Unless  this  injury  be  inflicted,  the  man 
is  not  a  true  Catholic ;  he  is  not  sure  to  re- 
main a  Catholic.  If  it  be  cured,  he  cannot 
remain  a  Catholic  in  the  papal  sense  of  the 
word.  So  subtly  do  men  vary  in  their  re- 
ligious experiences  that  some  Catholics  who 
feel  very  clearly  their  personal  union  with 
God,  do  upon  excommunication,  smile  at  the 
church  ;  others  grieve  ;  others  go  forward  and 
back,  now  proclaiming  allegiance  and  again 
becoming  aware  of  their  independence. 

All  of  these  individual  spiritual  experiences 
are  part  of  the  history  of  Christianity.  As 
they  become  massed  into  political  forces,  or 
become  visible  as  popular  movements,  history 
deals  with  them,  and  history  is  obliged  to  use 

IS 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

every  shift  and  engine  of  philosophic  thought 
in  order  to  deal  with  its  cloudy  material.  Yet 
behind  the  clouds,  are  the  living  men  and 
women  of  the  past.  In  considering  the  disrup- 
tion of  the  old  Roman  hierarchy,  we  are 
obliged  at  one  moment  to  have  in  mind  the 
worldly  frame  of  government,  and  at  the 
next,  the  spiritual  conditions  of  men. 

The  new  states  and  nations  which  were 
growing  up  out  of  the  Roman  Empire  found 
that  there  was  no  room  for  national  feeling 
within  the  old  Roman  system.  They  had  to 
fight  their  way  out  of  it.  The  new  nationali- 
ties became  a  species  of  competing  religions, 
intricately  bound  up  with  doctrinal  questions 
and  with  practical  politics.  If  heresy  was  a 
kind  of  treason  to  the  church, — so  also  the 
payment  of  Peter's  pence  to  the  church  be- 
came a  kind  of  heresy  to  the  new  national 
feeling.  I  confess  that  I  have  been  follow- 
ing the  fashion  of  contemporary  historians  in 
putting  forward  the  secular  aspect  of  the 
matter.  This  aspect  is  always  the  most  vis- 
ible of  the  two ;  because  patriotism  and  na- 
tional politics  are  things  which  the  modern 
mind  easily  imagines ;  whereas  the  attach- 
ments of  religious  feeling  are  but  faintly 
understood  by  us  to-day.  The  struggle,  how- 
ever,  always   bears   two   interpretations.      It 

i6 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

can  be  thought  of  as  a  struggle  for  temporal 
power  going  on  among  the  rulers ;  and  again, 
as  an  inward,  religious,  and  ethical  struggle 
going  on  within  the  hearts  of  individuals. 
One  must  be  on  one's  guard  against  those 
modern  historians  who  write  a  history  of  re- 
ligion and  leave  religion  out. 

The  form  in  which  religious  disturbance 
arose  was  somewhat  as  follows : — Certain 
pious  citizens  were  perhaps  living  in  a  Ger- 
man, French,  or  English  mediaeval  city,  pay- 
ing their  money  regularly  to  Rome  and  obey- 
ing her  humbly.  Among  these  men,  however, 
there  arose  new  curiosities,  new  sciences,  new 
learning,  new  individual  piety,  and  all  of  these 
things  weakened  the  allegiance  of  the  citizens 
to  Rome,  and  played  into  the  hands  of  the 
new  national  governments  which  were  just 
arising  based  upon  geography,  law,  and  lan- 
guage. 

No  doubt  the  beginnings  of  anti-Roman  in- 
fluence could  be  traced  straight  back  to  an- 
tiquity. It  was,  however,  not  till  the  time 
of  the  Reformation  that  the  new  forces  pre- 
vailed. The  old  Roman  Empire  fell  and  mod- 
ern Europe  was  born.  The  great  Cathedral  of 
Mediaeval  Civilization  could  not  be  entirely 
demolished  all  at  once ;  but  tiie  outer  walls 
were  taken  and  the  first  series  of  never  end- 

17 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

ing  demolitions  and  reconstructions  of  the 
ramparts  was  begun.  Ever  since  that  time 
both  sides  have  been  working  like  ants  over 
the  pile, — the  demolishers  striving  to  complete 
their  work  of  destruction,  the  defenders,  to 
save  as  much  as  possible  of  the  sacred  edi- 
fice. 

The  important  thing  to  understand  is  that 
the  whole  controversy  in  all  its  forms,  and 
through  all  the  ages,  hinges  upon  the  same 
idea,  the  same  conflict  of  claim  in  the  breast 
of  the  individual.  For  instance: — You  have 
a  Roman  Catholic  friend.  How  far  will  he 
obey  the  church?  That  depends.  If  he  is  a 
converted  pagan  of  the  fourth  century,  he  will 
be  almost  sure  to  obey  it;  but  not  altogether 
so.  If  too  much  be  required  of  him,  he  will 
resist.  If  your  friend  is  a  modern  person, 
a  teacher,  for  example  in  the  public  school 
of  to-day  and  a  good  Catholic,  he  will  tend 
to  obey  his  church ;  but  not  altogether  so.  He 
would  not  perhaps  favor  putting  Roman  Cath- 
olic flags  on  an  American  town  hall.  He 
would  very  likely  not  concede  the  extreme 
claims  of  the  church  to  control  all  the  educa- 
tion in  the  world.  He  will  act  according  to 
circumstances.  If  his  private  interests  and 
his  personal  feelings  are  greatly  outraged  by 
some  claims  which  the  church  makes  upon 

i8 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

him,  he  will  throw  over  the  church  altogether 
as  was  done  by  so  many  people  during  the 
Reformation. 

The  practical  problem  of  the  Roman  church 
is  forever  the  same,  i.  e.  that  of  getting  men 
to  give  money,  and  to  give  obedience.  Yet 
the  problem  is  ever  varying, — How  much 
money?  How  much  obedience?  Now,  as  the 
outward  and  practical  problem  remains  the 
same  throughout  the  ages,  so  does  the  in- 
ward and  spiritual  problem  upon  which  all 
hinges,  remain  always  the  same.  The  religious 
consciousness,  the  personal  relation  of  a  man 
to  God,  that  is  the  first  idea.  The  authority  of 
the  church,  her  right  to  intervene  between 
the  individual  soul  and  God, — that  is  the  sec- 
ond idea.  It  was,  therefore,  by  no  accident 
but  out  of  inevitable  necessity  that  the  case  of 
Molinos  which  I  referred  to  a  few  moments 
ago,  exhibited  to  us  both  of  these  elements 
which  are  essentially  irreconcilable,  and  which 
go  on  contending  forever  as  Jacob  and  Esau 
contended  together  in  the  womb. 

So  long  as  these  two  principles  are  contend- 
ing in  the  silent  soul  of  some  individual  we 
cannot  see  them, — they  are  politically  unim- 
portant. The  church  is  therefore  able  to  be 
indulgent  towards  the  sufferer.  The  church  is 
able  to  make  its  yoke  easy  in  individual  cases. 

19 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

The  experience  of  fourteen  hundred  years  has 
provided  the  theory  for  every  sort  of  private 
indulgence.  The  result  is  that  so  far  as  doc- 
trine or  conduct  is  concerned,  one  may  be  a 
good  Catholic  and  believe  or  do  almost  any- 
thing, so  long  as  one  formally  concedes  the 
authority  of  the  church. 

One  cannot,  of  course,  remain  a  good  Cath- 
olic and  yet  refuse  to  submit.  If  you  refuse  to 
submit,  you  become  a  symbol  of  opposition: 
your  case  takes  on  an  enormous  significance  at 
once.  You  must  be  put  down, — burned  or  ex- 
communicated,— because  for  the  church  to  re- 
frain from  doing  so  is  for  the  curia  to  abandon 
its  claim  and  to  abdicate.  This  metaphysical 
claim  is  the  symbol  of  a  power  so  very  awful 
that  you,  individually,  have  to  be  burned. 
They  may  love  you,  but  they  are  obliged  to 
burn  you.  You,  on  your  side,  by  being  burned 
are  doing  your  maximum  of  protest.  Both 
Bruno  and  the  Pope  who  burns  Bruno  are 
playing  fortissimo:  each  has  thrown  double 
sixes.  By  this  method  of  fighting,  the  curia 
retains  its  imaginative  position,  retains  the 
power,  if  it  is  losing  in  one  place,  to  build 
itself  up  elsewhere.  The  Roman  church  re- 
gards itself  as  the  custodian  of  the  Jewish 
Scriptures— i.  e.  of  all  kinds  of  truth.  To 
make  any  compromise  about  this,  to  concede 

20 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

rights  to  science,  or  to  scholarship,  or  to  in- 
dividual piety,  would  be  to  cast  away  the  di- 
vining rod  with  which  it  claims  to  find  the  liv- 
ing waters  for  humanity.  Moreover,  the 
church  is  an  organization.  Individual  kings 
have  sometimes  abdicated,  but  no  organiza- 
tion has  ever  abdicated;  and  beside  this,  the 
whole  battery  of  Catholic  philosophy,  dogma, 
ritual,  and  discipline  makes  any  such  course 
impossible  for  the  Roman  church.  The  old 
Roman  machinery  and  paraphernalia  of  gov- 
ernment can  only  work  in  one  way.  The  men 
educated  in  that  tradition  can  only  act  in  one 
way.  If  anything  is  certain  in  this  world  it  is 
that  the  Roman  church  cannot  ever  become 
Liberal.  The  Catholic  liberals  of  all  ages 
(quite  recently  the  Modernists),  are  always 
obliged  to  submit,  because  they  concede  some 
general  powers  of  government  to  Rome.  Of 
course  Rome  will  name  the  limits  of  those 
powers,  and  when  she  does  so,  these  gentle- 
men must  submit  or  leave  the  church. 

Let  us  now  reflect  upon  a  strange  matter. 
The  ideas,  nay,  even  the  words  and  images 
of  this  whole  controversy  remain  much  the 
same  throughout  the  ages.  But  the  substance 
changes.  A  few  years  ago  I  read  that  very 
truthful  book,  Fogazzaro's  novel,  II  Santo, 
which  is  devoted  to  showing  the  embarrass- 

21 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

ment  into  which  the  Papacy  must  be  thrown 
to-day  by  the  appearance  of  a  saint.  The 
book  appears  to  the  Protestant  mind  to  be 
an  indictment  of  Catholic  practices;  and  I 
believe  that  the  aged  and  very  distinguished 
author  was  obliged  to  humiliate  himself  and 
to  recant  in  some  way.  The  thing  which  most 
impressed  me,  however,  about  the  story  was 
that  the  most  frightful  powers  of  the  Ro- 
man church  had  vanished.  The  Santo,  who 
resists  all  temptations  and  avoids  all  snares, 
should  logically  have  been  burnt  in  the  mar- 
ket-place. And  yet,  so  far  as  I  could  find  out, 
all  that  the  pontiff  of  the  story  did  to  the 
Saint  was  to  beg  him  to  "move  on."  The  Saint 
became  an  unpleasant  figure  at  the  door  of 
the  Vatican;  and  so  the  Church  persuaded 
him  to  remove  himself  and  to  live  in  disgrace 
at  Sorrento,  I  began  to  reflect  inwardly  as 
to  this  unexpected  ending  of  the  novel;  and 
I  wondered  who  was  to  blame,  and  who  was 
responsible  for  this  change  in  Roman  condi- 
tions, and  why  it  was  that  the  Saint  could 
not  be  conveniently  burned  to-day  in  the 
market-place.  And  it  seemed  to  me  upon 
reflection  that  the  whole  modern  world  was 
the  unity  which  controlled  the  situation.  One 
would  never  find  this  out  through  any  process 
of  reasoning  about  doctrines.    There  is  some- 

22 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

thing  outside  of  our  doctrines  which  controls 
us  and  makes  us  what  we  are. 

There  is  something  outside  of  even  the 
Roman  Cathohc  Church  which  controls  her 
and  makes  her  what  she  is.  She  also  and 
in  spite  of  her  history  is  a  part  of  the  pres- 
ent, and  it  is  merely  in  order  to  find  out  her 
relation  to  this  present  that  I  have  been  study- 
ing the  past.  So,  also,  each  individual  is  not 
merely  a  thing  of  to-day.  Each  of  us  does 
consciously  or  unconsciously  represent  in  him- 
self the  whole  process  of  humanity.  We 
cannot  separate  ourselves  from  the  past ;  we 
can  only  seek  to  establish  our  true  relation 
to  it.  The  Catholic  church  in  all  its  disinte- 
grations should  be  regarded  as  a  crumbling 
unity.  It  is  the  greatest  historic  residuum 
in  the  world,  the  most  perfect  piece  of  the 
past,  and  it  gives  us  a  more  accurate  measure 
for  judging  of  the  past  than  any  other  extant 
institution.  It  is  made  up,  as  we  have  seen, 
of  two  very  separable  elements : — the  love  of 
God,  and  the  control  of  men.  The  first  is  the 
divine  and  mystical  portion  which  can  be  un- 
derstood only  by  those  who  have  personal  ex- 
perience of  religion.  The  second  is  the 
work-a-day  element  which  every  one  can  un- 
derstand. It  consists  in  the  using  of  influ- 
ence over  men  to  secure  particular  ends.    All 

33 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

governments  do  this,  sometimes  gently,  some- 
times cruelly,  sometimes  with  horrible  tyranny. 
The  nature  of  such  abuses  needs  no  explana- 
tion.   We  all  understand  them. 

It  is  the  union  of  true  religion  with  a  per- 
fected system  of  social  tyranny  that  gives  the 
Roman  church  its  particular  character.  I  do 
not  hesitate  to  call  that  religion  "true"  which 
gives  a  man  an  abiding  consciousness  of  God. 
I  know  that  true  religion  in  this  sense  com- 
bines well  and  easily  with  every  form  of 
vice,  ambition,  and  cruelty  whether  Protestant 
or  Catholic.  Nevertheless,  it  seems  to  me  that 
the  consciousness  of  God  is  just  so  much  truth, 
and  should  be  so  regarded  for  clarity's  sake : 
the  evil  part  can  then  be  considered  by  itself. 

The  object  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church 
in  its  governmental  capacity  is  to  confuse  these 
two  elements.  The  Church  Dominant  says  to 
a  man :  "I  am  your  consciousness  of  God ; 
therefore  obey."  This  involves  a  confusion 
of  mind  and  upon  that  confusion  rests  the 
whole  structure. 

In  writing  the  opening  account  of  the  Ro- 
man church  in  this  paper,  I  could  not  help 
feeling  that  the  Roman  Catholic  layman  would 
read  it  with  a  smile;  because  my  paper  ap- 
pears to  deal  with  externals,  with  the  history, 
the  bells,  the  pomp,  etc., — and  I  seem  to  leave 

24 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

out  of  account  the  one  little  hot  thread  of 
heart's  devotion  which  really  holds  the  whole 
church  together — I  mean  the  approach  to 
Christ  through  the  Sacraments.  I  look  daily 
upon  the  faces  of  Roman  Catholic  women,  and 
see  often  a  depth  of  quiet  devotion  that  ex- 
plains life  to  them  and  makes  them  happy. 
These  women  are  not  sunk  in  a  brutish  super- 
stition. They  are  holy  people.  "What  then? 
What  would  you  have?  Where  is  the  evil?" 
The  evil  lies  in  the  support  which  all  good 
Catholics,  including  these  saints,  give  and  must 
give  to  some  of  the  most  horrible  iniquities 
of  the  world.  In  order  to  understand  the 
matter  you  must  take  a  cross-section  of  society. 
You  must  take  the  dollar  given  by  the  de- 
vout Boston  housemaid  and  trace  it  into  the 
pocket  of  the  Catholic  spy  in  Berlin. 

I  do  not  devote  this  paper  to  laying  bare  the 
historic  abuses  of  the  Roman  church,  but  to 
explaining  the  principle  at  the  bottom  of 
them.  Those  abuses  are  very  familiar  to  us 
all.  No  Catholic  denies  them.  They  multiply 
in  each  generation  according  to  the  complexion 
of  the  age.  They  are,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
means  through  which  humanity  is  saved  from 
Rome  because,  by  the  operation  of  natural  law, 
Rome  always  uses  methods  which  a  little 
shock  the  world's  conscience.     As  the  world 

25 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

improves,  Rome  improves;  but  the  relation 
remains. 

Classic  antiquity  knew  no  such  wickedness 
as  was  revealed  to  us  during  the  Middle 
Ages.  Before  Christ  had  showed  new  depths 
in  human  goodness  the  corresponding  depths 
of  iniquity  could  not  be  imagined. 

The  object  of  this  paper  is  to  spread  the 
news  that  all  the  abuses  of  the  Roman  Church 
are  made  possible  only  through  their  connec- 
tion with  a  sentiment  which  is  holy.  We  must 
remember  these  things  in  regarding  the  pres- 
ent ;  we  must  remember  them  in  reviewing  the 
past.  We  must  wade  through  the  worst  acts 
of  the  Inquisition  in  the  sixteenth  century  or 
stand  over  the  dreadful  history  of  Naples  in 
the  nineteenth  without  forgetting  that  all  this 
crime,  horror,  and  tyranny  is  a  perversion 
of  a  divine  intuition  in  the  hearts  of  men. 
This  is  the  evil, — this  spiritual  perversion ;  not 
theft,  not  the  rack,  not  the  jail,  not  the  ex- 
ternals of  tyranny  which  show  so  plainly  in 
history,  but  the  invisible  intercepting  of 
Christ's  message  at  the  source,  and  the  maim- 
ing of  minds  at  the  birth. 

You  can  not,  to  be  sure,  save  the  Papacy 
even  by  this  reasoning.  The  Papacy  will  cling 
to  its  abuses,  which  grow  fainter  with  the  cen- 
turies and  as  Europe  becomes  better  policed. 

26 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

You  can  probably  never  rescue  the  Papacy  and 
make  it  into  a  mere  spiritual  dominion,  seek- 
ing no  money,  seeking  only  salvation  for  men. 
But  by  remembering  the  truth  in  which  all 
this  mass  of  error  is  founded,  you  can  re- 
tain a  true  relation  to  a  very  large  portion  of 
humanity  both  living  and  dead,  and  can  avoid 
establishing  a  relation  towards  Catholicism 
which  is  both  dogmatic  and  inhuman. 

I  confess  that  in  Europe  passion  has  always 
ruled  the  day.  Religion  herself  has  very 
generally  been  lost  in  the  scuffle,  during  the 
wars  of  religion.  The  history  of  Protestant- 
ism has  been  the  history  of  the  gradual  sepa- 
ration of  private  piety  from  church  domi- 
nation. It  has  been  the  history  of  the  putting 
apart  of  those  two  familiar  ideas :  the  love  of 
God,  and  the  control  of  church.  How  firmly 
fixed  in  the  European  mind  was  the  notion 
that  there  must  exist  somewhere  a  church 
control  may  be  seen  in  the  bigotry  of  Luther, 
of  Calvin, — of  all  early  Protestantisms.  So 
deeply  were  the  roots  of  the  Roman  Empire 
entwined  in  the  mental  habit  of  Europe. 

We  have  seen  that  the  Roman  Church  which 
was  once  the  government  of  the  whole  of 
Europe,  was  gradually  shuffled  off  through  the 
rise  of  new  national  feelings,  and  of  new 
kinds  of  piety  and  learning  until  the  Organi- 

27 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

zation  which  had  ruled  all  things  was  left  as 
merely  a  great  secret  society  with  its  inherited 
dogmas  and  practices,  and  its  Great  Claim. 
That  Claim  was  and  is  to  tie  up  again  those 
two  ideas  which  every  force  in  society  ap- 
pears to  be  driving  asunder,  to  confuse  ideas 
which  are  daily  and  yearly  becoming  more  in- 
con  fusible  and  distinct.  In  the  early  days  of 
the  church,  while  her  enemies  were  external, 
she  needed  but  a  simple  philosophy.  But 
as  her  internal  troubles  grew  fiercer,  and  as 
quasi-civil  war  within  her  own  boundaries 
grew  hot,  her  thinkers  were  put  to  newer  the- 
ories. She  was  obliged  to  use  her  wits  more 
and  more  in  keeping  up  her  prestige.  And 
thus  it  came  about  that  a  lower  morality 
was  developed  during  the  Reformation  than 
had  ever  existed  before  in  the  church,  or 
perhaps  in  the  history  of  the  world.  A  simi- 
lar thing  happened,  and  for  similar  reasons, 
during  the  struggle  of  the  Slave  Power  in 
America  between  1830  and  i860.  During  the 
years  when  our  Slave  Power  found  it  neces- 
sary to  shorten  its  hand  in  order  to  sustain 
its  ascendancy,  ethical  theory  was  stretched 
so  as  to  cover  practices  that  were  more  and 
more  revolting  to  right  feeling  and  common 
instinct.  Similarly  during  the  Reformation, 
when  the  Church  believed  her  very  life  to 

28 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

be  at  stake,  her  practices  became  less  scrupu- 
lous and  more  severe;  and  to  cover  some  of 
these  developments  a  philosophy  was  required. 
This  leads  me  to  speak  of  the  rise  of  the 
Jesuit  Order. 

The  Roman  Catholic  Church  was  shaken  to 
its  foundation  by  the  revolt  of  northern  Ger- 
many. Luther  had  defied  her  and  she  had  not 
been  able  to  punish  him.  One  would  think 
that  such  an  outcome  would  have  led  to  re- 
forms within  the  church  and  the  triumph  of 
liberal  ideas.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  led 
to  a  reaction  and  to  a  counter-reformation 
within  the  church,  which  put  the  extreme  con- 
servatives in  power.  In  religious  struggles 
all  violence,  harsh  words,  wars,  persecutions, 
etc.,  tend  to  put  the  extremists  in  power  in 
both  camps.  The  Roman  Church,  through  the 
triumph  of  Luther's  cause,  had  the  benefit, 
as  it  were,  of  being  persecuted.  It  became 
fiercer  than  ever.  And  there  arose  a  man  of 
genius  who  personified  this  new  fierceness. 
Ignatius  Loyola  was  a  man  of  genius  in  that 
he  builded  better  than  he  knew.  His  func- 
tion was  to  re-embody  the  authoritative  idea, 
to  reduce  to  human  algebra  that  part  of  the 
church's  dealing  with  humanity  through  which 
she  caused  men  to  obey.  We  have  seen  that 
the  idea  of  authority  was  always  in  the  Ro- 

39 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

man  system.  Authority  was  the  second  idea, 
always  at  struggle  with  the  first  idea,  always 
interfering  between  the  soul  and  the  soul's 
consciousness  of  God.  Loyola  perceived  that 
Authority  rested  partly  on  idea,  but  more 
largely  on  training. 

He  therefore  established  a  society  upon 
the  single  thought,  Obedience ;  and  he  trained 
his  neophytes  until  they  became  mere  creatures 
of  the  order, — they  must  become  like  dead 
bodies  in  the  hands  of  the  General.  To  kill 
the  individual  soul  was  the  aim  of  Loyola,  to 
create  men  who  had  nothing,  did  nothing, 
thought  nothing,  desired  nothing,  knew  noth- 
ing as  individuals,  was  the  Jesuit  aim;  and  it 
was  accomplished.  Loyola  perceived  freshly 
what  had  always  been  the  essence  of  the 
Church  Dominant,  and  he  produced  a  stronger 
solution  of  this  thing  than  was  in  the  old  sys- 
tem. If  the  old  was  gunpowder,  the  new  was 
dynamite. 

While  Loyola's  invention  is  undoubtedly  the 
most  evil  thought  in  history,  and  while  the 
Society  of  Jesus  is  probably  the  tightest  knot 
of  reactionary  influence  upon  the  globe,  we 
must  not  credit  Loyola  with  an  understand- 
ing of  these  results.  The  Protestant  mind 
attributes  insincerity  to  persons  whose  very 
essence  was  sincerity,  whose  very  soul  and 

30 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

being  were  absorbed  into  their  work.  Loyola 
was  one  of  these  men.  Let  us,  if  we  can, 
perceive  that  there  is  only  one  error  in  the 
whole  headlong,  sacrificial  self-oblation  of 
Loyola  and  of  his  followers,  namely,  that  the 
oblation  and  prostration  are  not  done  quite 
absolutely  to  God  himself.  There  is  an  in- 
tervention :  there  is  a  third  party.  Some- 
one is  taking  charge  of  these  souls  besides 
God. 

Loyola  seems  to  have  intended  to  prop  up 
the  Papacy ;  and  the  special  vows  of  obedience 
which  the  Jesuit  makes  to  the  Pope,  seem  in- 
tended to  supply  the  Pope  with  a  sort  of  inner 
body-guard,  to  counteract,  as  it  were,  the 
democracy  of  the  College  of  Cardinals.  At 
any  rate,  through  Loyola's  Order,  the  reaction- 
aries were  knitted  together  into  a  secret  So- 
ciety, or  cabal.  The  kernel  of  mediaeval 
thought  and  practice  has  thus  been  preserved 
down  to  our  own  day  in  the  Institutes  of  St. 
Ignatius.  Loyola  created  an  imperium  in 
imperio,  a  body  whose  members  place  the  in- 
terests of  their  own  order  above  the  interests 
of  their  faith.  The  Society  was  very  soon 
used  as  a  means  of  controlling  the  Papacy. 
The  Order  has,  at  times,  been  dissolved  by 
the  Papacy,  and,  at  times  (as  at  present), 
has  worked  in  concert  with  the  Papacy.     But 

31 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

the  Jesuit  Order,  as  an  influence,  is  always 
separable  from  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  at 
large.  The  Roman  Church  has  always  moved 
forward  as  a  unity ;  but  since  Loyola's  time 
there  has  been  a  vertical  division  in  the  minds 
of  its  managers  (invisible  to  the  outer  world), 
which  makes  a  schism  between  the  Jesuits  and 
the  rest  of  the  hierarchy.  There  is  an  im- 
perium  in  imperio.  The  hierarchy  is  thus 
divided  into  two  groups  which  though  they 
generally  work  together  think  apart. 

The  Jesuits  are  men  who  have  been  at 
school  and  college  together.  They  have  been 
through  the  severest  training  ever  devised 
for  the  purpose  of  subjugating  the  private 
will,  and  they  have  done  this  in  company  with 
one  another.  The  comradeship  from  early 
childhood  in  an  exclusive,  secret  society,  and 
obedience  to  the  same  General,  make  the  Jes- 
uits into  a  clique,  almost  into  a  species  by 
themselves.  In  theory  all  sentiments  of  race, 
language,  and  origin  should  have  been  sedu- 
lously rubbed  away  through  a  regimen  of 
changing  domicile  and  perpetual  routine,  until 
the  perfected  Jesuit  cannot  find  in  the  whole 
wide  world  another  man  like  himself,  except 
it  be  a  Jesuit. 

The  Jesuits  are  the  principal  teaching  or- 
der of  the  Roman  church.    Thus  if  you  apply 

32 


NOTES    ON   RELIGION 

to  the  Archbishop  in  New  York  for  some  aid 
in  church  matters,  he  will,  as  soon  as  he  un- 
derstands that  a  question  of  doctrine  is  con- 
cerned, ring  a  bell  and  ask  if  Father  So-and- 
So  is  at  leisure ;  saying,  that  as  the  matter 
is  one  of  theology,  the  Jesuits  will  attend  to 
it.  You  will  then  be  ushered  in  to  the  sanc- 
tum of  a  highly-educated  English  priest,  per- 
haps from  Stonyhurst,  who  will  deal  with 
you  as  ably  and  as  readily  as  the  most  per- 
fected cash  register  deals  with  the  confiding 
five  cent  piece.  So,  also,  at  the  close  of  some 
great  day  in  Roman  Catholic  history, — some 
day  when  a  glorious  victory  has  been  won, 
a  great  step  forward  has  been  taken,  a  news- 
paper founded,  or  a  tablet  to  the  Pope  at- 
tached to  the  exterior  of  a  United  States  Cus- 
tom House, — if  you  should  enter  late  at  night 
into  the  Archbishop's  Palace  on  Madison 
Avenue,  you  would  find  the  Cardinals  and 
Princes  of  the  Church  sitting  up  in  solemn 
conclave,  eager,  powerful  men.  And  if  you 
should  linger  on  unobserved  until  the  hour  of 
parting  came,  you  would  see  all  of  these  great 
men  retire  and  disperse  with  holy  salutations ; 
going  in  two  bands,  and  in  two  different  direc- 
tions, the  Jesuits  in  one  direction,  and  the  non- 
Jesuits  in  another,  each  band  to  its  own  lair 
to  talk  it  over.     We  must  return  to  the  Ref- 

33 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

ormation,  however,  if  we  would  understand 
these  doings  in  Madison  Avenue. 

The  practical  genius  of  Ignatius  Loyola 
knitted  the  Papacy  together  by  making  alle- 
giance easy.  We  have  seen  that  the  Church 
Dominant  had  from  the  earliest  times  made 
use  of  its  power  to  condone  sin  as  an  engine 
of  government.  Loyola  and  his  followers  de- 
veloped this  idea  into  a  science,  and  they  did 
so  at  the  very  moment  when  such  a  philosophy 
was  required  in  order  to  keep  many  powerful, 
rich,  skeptical,  worldly  people  in  the  church. 
By  dividing  the  substance  of  religion  from  the 
form,  Loyola  and  his  followers  revealed  the 
very  essence  of  all  religious  malpractice. 
From  his  time  dates  that  system  of  dialectic 
by  which  evil  is  good  and  good  evil,  accord- 
ing to  the  interests  of  the  church. 

The  invention  of  Loyola  greatly  accelerated 
the  decay  of  the  Roman  system;  because  the 
segregation  of  all  that  was  most  conserva- 
tive in  that  system  into  a  society  whose  works 
were  very  visible,  kept  the  worst  abuses  of  the 
Roman  Church  always  to  the  fore  in  Euro- 
pean politics,  and  brought  into  sharper  and 
ever  sharper  contrast  the  cruel  workings  of 
the  church,  and  the  benevolent  tendencies  of 
modem  civilization.  The  Jesuits  have  brought 
discredit  upon  the  Catholic  church  much  as 

34 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

Tammany  Hall  brings  discredit  upon  Democ- 
racy. Each  shows  the  extreme  abuse  of  a 
system.  The  difference  between  the  two  cases 
is  that  Tammany  Hall  is  more  open  to  outer 
influence  than  the  Society  of  Jesus  is.  Tam- 
many Hall  improves  as  fast  as  the  New  York 
citizen  improves ;  whereas  the  Jesuit  is  an 
artificial  product  who  is  continuously  being 
produced  by  a  hot-house  education,  and  his 
Order  is  therefore  less  open  to  the  general 
influences  of  modern  society  than  any  other 
body  of  civilians  in  the  world.  Nevertheless, 
that  Order  is,  in  a  practical  sense,  affected 
by  the  modern  world  which  surrounds  and 
encloses  it  (as  we  have  seen  by  Foggazaro's 
Santo),  and  we  must  beware  of  regarding 
even  the  Jesuit  Order  as  a  thing  by  itself 
and  wholly  foreign  to  ourselves. 

If  most  Protestants  do  not  know  that  there 
is  such  a  thing  as  a  good  Jesuit,  this  is  due 
to  the  Jesuit  record  in  history.  The  desire 
for  domination  and  for  money,  the  vacuity 
of  idea,  the  vulgarity  of  aim  in  the  Jesuits  has 
left  them  a  reputation  that  does  not  shine. 
And  yet  there  have  always  been  men  among 
them  who  exhibited  the  military  virtues,  cour- 
age, obedience,  self-sacrifice  in  the  highest 
degree.  These  very  virtues  are  the  ones  which 
lead  to  the  worst  vices  of  the  moral  and  in- 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

tellectual  world,  namely  to  the  destruction  of 
private  conscience  or  of  private  mind. 

In  one  sense  the  Protestant  can  never  meet 
the  mind  of  the  Jesuit;  because  the  Jesuit 
is  forbidden  to  hold  private  opinions.  His 
talk  must  be  formal.  Yet  the  Protestant 
ought  to  use  every  effort  to  see  the  good  in 
these  men,  a  goodness  that  beams  out  of 
some  of  them  in  spite  of  our  analysis,  which 
condemns  their  system  of  education  and  con- 
demns the  history  of  their  order.  The  Cath- 
olic is  precluded  by  dogma  from  conceding 
true  holiness  to  Protestants.  But  the  Protes- 
tant has  no  excuse  for  looking  with  a  jaun- 
diced eye  upon  the  saints  in  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic Church. 

One  more  general  remark  about  the  Roman 
Church  and  I  will  speak  about  America.  The 
Hierarchy  must  be  thought  of  as  a  vast  mov- 
ing caravan  with  a  wonderful  outfit  of 
instruments  and  paraphernalia  for  attracting 
and  ruling  the  peoples  of  the  earth.  It  is  a 
complex,  roaming,  wallowing  wave  of  power, 
the  residuum  of  the  ancient  Roman  power, 
and  it  becomes  more  and  more  detached  from 
its  geographical  base,  as  it  rolls  across  human- 
ity with  the  momentum  of  the  centuries  behind 
it.  This  coil  of  human  influences  picks  up  men 
and  nations  in  one  place  and  drops  men  and 

36 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

nations  in  another  place.  The  Great  Need  of 
humanity  cries  to  Rome.  The  hunger  of  men 
for  a  union  with  God  cries  out  to  her.  On 
the  other  hand,  her  old  subjects  are  constantly 
in  revolt.  They  are  over-taxed,  kept  in  ig- 
norance and  bondage  and  separated  from 
modern  progress.  Thus  Rome  is  constantly 
losing  adherents  in  her  old  dominions ;  and,  as 
she  does  so,  she  moves  on  to  new  countries 
with  her  propaganda. 

In  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  it 
became  evident  to  minds  far  less  acute  than 
those  of  the  great  Roman  Ecclesiastics  that  the 
Papacy  was  losing  ground  in  Europe  and  must 
turn  to  America.  It  must  come  to  the  United 
States  and  grow  up  with  the  country.  It  has 
done  so.  We  have  had  the  Roman  Catholic 
question  during  the  last  fifty  years;  but  we 
have  not  had  time  to  attend  to  it.  In  Europe, 
where  the  history  of  this  Religion  has  been 
enacted,  the  whole  matter  is  understood  by  the 
educated  classes.  The  Wars  of  Religion  have 
never  been  forgotten,  and  the  ever-present 
ultra-montane  question  burns  openly.  In 
Europe  people  are  not  afraid  to  speak  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church.  But  America  was 
settled  by  Protestants  after  the  end  of  the 
Wars  of  Religion,  or  by  Protestants  who  es- 
caped the  question  by  coming  here.     We  have 

37 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

had  no  religious  question  in  America  and  our 
people  have  forgotten  what  the  question 
means.  Besides  this  we  have  been  engaged  in 
making  money ;  we  have  been  harassed  by  our 
slavery  troubles ;  in  more  recent  times  we  have 
been  preoccupied  with  practical  reforms.  We 
have  not  been  interested  in  religion;  we  have 
forgotten  the  principles  of  the  matter.  The 
extraordinary  ignorance  of  our  people  in  mat- 
ters of  history,  their  belief  in  destiny,  their 
inability  to  stop  and  reflect  about  anything, 
their  desire  that  our  politics  shall  not  contain 
any  religious  question,  their  sense  of  security, 
due  to  the  presence  of  the  Atlantic  Ocean 
between  themselves  and  Europe — all  these 
things  have  led  the  Americans  of  the  last  fifty 
years  to  hide  their  heads  in  the  sand  in  regard 
to  the  doings  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church. 
Our  press  is  timid  and  public  opinion  ap- 
proves. In  our  politics  the  question  has  been 
shunned  as  far  as  possible:  such  is  our  wis- 
dom. We  are  afraid  of  getting  angry:  we 
would  hurt  no  one's  feelings.  The  instinct 
of  the  Protestants  has,  on  the  whole,  been  an 
instinct  of  silence.  This  has  worked  in  well 
with  the  aims  of  Rome;  for,  be  it  observed, 
while  Rome  can  work  in  silence,  opposition 
to  Rome  involves  publicity. 

Rome  has  been  the  first  to  take  the  field  in 

38 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

America.  Within  the  last  few  years  a  great 
Catholic  forward  movement  has  been  in 
progress:  Rome  has  proclaimed  openly  her 
intention  of  ruling  America.  For  many  years 
the  chief  income  of  the  Papacy  has  been  drawn 
from  America :  and  now  it  appears,  we  are  to 
become  a  Roman  Catholic  country.  Rome 
has  spoken. 

Her  method  of  speech  is  the  same  as  it  was 
in  the  Sixteenth  Century — a  rasping  arro- 
gance. It  is  a  curious  fact  that  while  the 
Protestant  is  adjured  not  to  injure  the  feel- 
ings of  the  Catholic,  the  great  Roman  Eccle- 
siastics, Cardinals,  and  Archbishops,  make  it 
a  point  to  speak  with  calculated  contempt  of 
all  that  the  Protestant  American  holds  dear — 
his  patriotism,  his  religion,  his  schools,  and  his 
domestic  life.  The  Catholic  layman  does  not 
do  this — partly  because  of  his  kindly  feelings, 
partly  because  he  is  not  in  the  secret  of  the 
movement.  He  is  indeed  the  middle  point 
about  which  the  whole  movement  turns ;  but 
he  is  not  yet  in  the  whirl  of  it. 

The  man  whose  allegiance  is  ultimately  at 
stake  in  this  contest,  the  man  about  whom 
the  battle  rages,  is  the  Roman  Catholic  lay- 
man. The  object  of  the  Hierarchy  is  always 
to  secure  the  support  of  this  man  for  its  ex- 
trcmcst  claims  (whatever  they  may  happen  to 

39 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

be).  The  method  of  securing  this  support 
was,  in  modern  times,  perfected  by  the  Jesuits 
and  consists  in  the  assumption  of  an  arrogant, 
overbearing  tone  and  the  doing  of  everything 
within  the  church's  power  to  irritate  Protestant 
feeling.  If  the  Protestants  respond  to  this 
treatment  in  kind;  if  they  become  angry  or 
indulge  in  violent  denunciation  of  the  Catholic 
Church,  then  the  Catholic  layman  naturally 
becomes  excited  and  is  thrown  into  a  mood 
in  which  he  is  apt  to  support  the  extremists 
of  his  own  party.  At  any  time  when  the 
Jesuits  are  in  control  of  the  Papal  See  a  hec- 
toring, squally  policy  may  be  looked  for  in 
foreign  countries.  The  situations  which  arise 
as  the  result  of  this  method,  give  special 
power  to  the  Jesuit  Order ;  because  that  Order 
is  military  in  form  and  thrives  in  war  times. 
It  was  through  a  reaction  of  this  sort  that 
Bismarck  was  goaded  into  persecuting  the 
Jesuits  in  the  seventies.  The  result  was  a  con- 
solidation of  Catholic  feeling  behind  the  Jesuit 
Order.  The  Roman  Catholics  have  held  the 
balance  of  power  in  the  Reichstag  ever  since. 
The  Papacy,  then,  from  time  to  time,  as- 
sumes a  militant  attitude  in  Protestant  coun- 
tries. Its  general  tone  may  be  expressed  as 
follows :  "We  intend  to  rule :  we  despise  you  : 
we  will  speak  and  act  with  open  contempt  of 

40 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

your  sacred  things.  But  woe  unto  you  if  you 
murmur  or  lisp  a  word  against  our  sacred 
religion.  Unless  you  sit  silent  and  accept  our 
insolence,  pay  us  our  money,  destroy  your  own 
social  system  and  substitute  ours,  we  will  raise 
such  a  revolt,  and  such  an  outcry  that  you'll 
have  a  religious  war  on  your  hands."  This 
reasoning  is  largely  unconscious ;  and  it  is  at 
the  bottom  of  the  present  Catholic  movement 
in  America. 

The  Papacy,  for  reasons  of  its  own,  believes 
that  the  time  has  now  come  for  a  great  up- 
rising; the  Church  must  show  its  power.  Our 
Press  is  easily  ruled.  Catholic  business  men 
are  marshalled  behind  the  advertisement 
columns :  the  rest  follows.  You  would  think, 
to  read  the  American  papers,  that  the  whole 
nation  was  thrilled  to  the  marrow  over  a  lawn- 
party  given  to  Monsignore  Flanagan  at  Ho- 
boken,  or  the  blessing  of  a  brass  farthing 
which  Father  Tim  found  in  the  charity-box 
on  his  first  Sunday  in  the  east  hundred-and- 
fourteenth  street  chapel  just  fifteen  years  ago. 
The  doings  and  the  pictures  of  great  prelates 
are  recorded  with  unctuous  servility  in  the 
great  dailies.  Their  insolent  sermons  are 
printed  at  great  lengtii.  The  social  life  of 
Roman  Catholicism  is  chronicled.  English 
Jesuits  adorn  the  drawing-rooms  of  Irish  mag- 

41 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

nates,  and  rich  American  ladies  besiege  the 
foyers  of  the  Prelates,  laying  their  great  posi- 
tion, their  sins  and  their  jewels  at  the  feet  of 
Rome.  It  would  be  easy  to  write  an  account 
of  this  movement  that  would  amuse  posterity. 
And  yet  we  ought  not  to  forget  that  there  is 
at  the  present  time  a  sincere  religious  move- 
ment going  on  all  over  America.  It  can  be 
felt  in  every  church,  in  every  political  party, 
in  every  reform  movement.  There  is  a  great 
and  deep  ground-swell  of  rehgion  in  Ameri- 
ca ;  and  this  lifts  also  the  Roman  Catholic 
Forward  Movement  into  dignity,  and  gives  it 
heart  and  heat.  The  goodness  and  beauty  in 
it  cannot  be  denied ;  nor  ought  anyone  to 
wish  to  diminish  the  love  of  God — just  be- 
cause it  inhabits  Roman  Catholic  bosoms. 

Our  task  is  harder ;  our  task  is  to  hold  fast 
to  the  good,  yet  to  understand  the  evil.  We 
need  not  to  grow  angry;  but  we  need  never 
submit.  The  problem  of  America — the  prob- 
lem for  the  leaders  of  thought  in  America 
to-day,  is  to  get  this  subject  opened  up,  upon 
clear  lines,  without  passion.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary for  the  American  to  be  eaten  up  by 
Rome,  to  have  his  public  moneys  directed  to  a 
foreign  secret  society,  and  the  books  in  his 
public  libraries  censored  by  the  Jesuits.  It  is 
not  necessary  for  him  to  sit  still  while  his 

42 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

children  are  taught  that  patriotism  is  a  sin 
and  that  the  priest  shall  control  in  politics. 
It  is  not  necessary  for  him  to  admit  that  his 
wife  is  a  concubine  and  his  children  are  ille- 
gitimate, because  the  church  of  Rome  did  not 
sanction  his  marriage.  If  the  American  thinks 
that  the  doctrines  I  have  mentioned  will  refute 
themselves,  or  that  they  will  not  work  in  our 
climate,  he  is  mistaken.  Those  doctrines  are 
working  very  smoothly  in  our  climate  to-day. 
Our  duty  is  to  break  silence  at  once,  and  to 
break  it  with  a  mace  that  is  heavy  and  calm. 

We  may  take  it  for  granted  that  the  Roman 
Church  in  America  will  be  what  it  has  been  in 
the  Protestant  countries  since  the  Reforma- 
tion, namely:  hostile  to  education,  hostile  to 
the  individual,  an  enemy  to  science;  the  de- 
clared opponent  of  all  goodness  save  its  own. 
The  Roman  Church  cannot  be  otherwise.  In 
its  essence,  and  by  its  own  professions,  it  must 
be  these  things.  I  am  not  defaming  it :  I  am 
stating  what  it  states.  I  am  repeating  its 
utterances.  Strange  to  say,  when  a  Protestant 
makes  such  statements  about  the  Roman 
Church  they  are  regarded  as  offensive;  but 
when  the  Pope  makes  them,  they  are  divinity. 

We  may,  I  think,  take  for  granted  that  in 
the  end,  the  powers  of  the  modern  world  will 
control  in  America,  and  that  the  domination 

43 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

of  Rome  will  be  rejected.  The  question  is 
how  far  that  Church  shall  get  before  it  is 
checked,  hozv  Catholic  this  country  shall  have 
become  before  the  tide  turns.  I  have  no  desire 
to  extinguish  the  Catholic  faith ;  but  to  arouse 
the  Catholic  layman  to  the  situation,  and  to 
beg  the  Protestant  layman  to  take  heed  of  it. 
The  old  mediaeval  situation  is  with  us  once 
more.  It  requires  clear  thought  and  benevo- 
lence; because  our  real  enemy  is  not  religion. 
The  real  enemy  is  confused  thought  and  bitter 
feeling.  Our  need  is  the  development  of  in- 
tellect, the  rise  of  spiritual  interests,  the  awak- 
ening of  new  individual  power  in  breasts  both 
Catholic  and  Protestant  throughout  the  land. 
Consider  what  the  average  American  citizen 
is  to-day.  He  is  a  man  with  faint  religious 
interests,  unused  to  the  handling  of  his  own 
political  affairs.  (They  have  been  until  quite 
lately  entrusted  to  middle-men.)  He  is  apt  to 
be  a  partisan  extremely  unwilling  to  stand  up 
alone  under  any  circumstances;  very  fearful 
of  making  enemies;  very  content  in  making 
money ;  extraordinarily  and  uniquely  ignorant 
of  the  history  of  the  Roman  Church.  The 
Roman  Catholic  layman  in  America  knows  lit- 
tle of  the  history  of  his  church :  no  more  does 
the  Protestant.  To  induce  such  a  man  as  I 
have  described  (whether  Protestant  or  Catho- 

44 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

He),  to  think  clearly  about  the  relations  be- 
tween religion  and  politics,  to  inform  himself 
accurately,  to  speak  openly,  to  act  deliberately, 
is  a  hard  matter.  You  wish  him  to  save 
American  education :  Alas,  he  has  no  philo- 
sophic or  historic  education.  You  ask  him  to 
protect  the  public  treasury :  He  has  for  long 
years  left  it  in  charge  of  his  business  manager. 
You  beseech  him  in  the  name  of  liberty  of 
conscience  and  of  the  Right  to  worship  God, 
to  awaken  out  of  his  dream :  These  appeals 
mean  little  to  a  mind  that  has  forgotten  that 
there  ever  was  any  serious  trouble  about  reli- 
gion in  the  world,  and  that  cannot  see  how 
such  things  are  of  importance. 

On  the  other  hand  consider  the  seductions 
which  active  participation  in  the  work  of  a 
great  secret  society — the  forward  Catholic 
Movement — must  iiave  for  just  such  a  mind 
as  I  have  described.  The  man  is  asked  to 
work  in  an  organization  where  he  will  be  sup- 
ported and  sustained  at  every  moment.  He 
works  as  a  partizan — he  works  for  particular 
and  comprehensible  ends,  generally  the  getting 
of  money  out  of  the  government  and  the  put- 
ting of  his  own  pals  into  office.  He  is  helped 
forward  in  his  business.  This  is  the  sort  of 
work  he  understands — namely,  practical  poli- 
tics.    TTc   retains  his   party   affiliations.     He 

4S 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

does  not  need  to  know  anything,  nor  to  exam- 
ine, think  upon,  speak  upon,  or  decide  any 
matter  except  according  to  instructions.  As 
for  religion,  he  is  provided  with  it;  and  as  I 
have  said  above,  it  is  true  religion.  There 
is  true  religion  in  it  for  the  most  part.  At 
least  I  believe  so. 

It  is  a  gloomy  view  of  the  matter  which 
I  have  sketched  in  the  last  paragraph.  If  this 
were  the  whole  truth  the  world  would  go 
straight  to  perdition.  If  the  forces  of  good 
and  evil  were  in  reality  so  arranged  as  we 
think  we  perceive  them  to  be,  the  evil  would 
always  win.  But  there  is  always  error  in 
our  analysis,  and  the  error  is  always  of  the 
same  sort.  The  error  consists  in  our  not  al- 
lowing enough  for  the  invisible  power  of 
Goodness.  The  real  battle  is  never  a  battle 
between  different  kinds  of  people,  as,  for  in- 
stance, between  Catholics  and  Protestants,  or 
between  good  Protestants  and  bad  Protestants, 
good  Jesuits  and  bad  Jesuits.  The  battle  is 
within  the  heart  of  each  man.  The  enduring 
factors  of  life  are  deep  and  trembling  things, 
which  dogma  cannot  petrify  nor  authority  con- 
trol. 

Let  us  regard  our  American  troubles  from 
the  standpoint  of  universal  history.  Did  not 
the  education  of  modern  Europe  come  about 

46 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

through  this  same  controversy ;  and  was  not 
the  Reformation  conducted  by  Catholic  lay- 
men ?  Every  man  in  this  land  who  is  pursuing 
truth  with  unselfish  devotion  is  combatting  the 
temporal  power  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Hier- 
archy— every  scientist,  every  philanthropist, 
every  politician,  every  writer,  every  teacher, 
every  priest.  You  who  look  on  the  whole 
movement  from  without,  do  you  not  know  that 
the  real  breach,  the  real  remedy,  must  come 
from  within?  Look  upon  no  man  as  your 
enemy.  Do  not  regard  the  Roman  Catholic 
mind  as  your  enemy.  In  reality  you  are  a 
part  of  that  mind.  Resist  not  evil.  Let  the 
energy  by  which  your  own  vision  reaches  the 
next  man  go  forward  with  the  power  of  a 
natural  process.  He  is  you.  He  is  reachable 
with  your  idea.  Though  he  were  the  Pope 
himself,  your  thought  may  reach  him.  Nay,  it 
does. 

If  you  study  the  last  four  centuries  you  will 
find  that  the  real  Reformation  came  neither 
from  the  Protestants  nor  from  the  Catholics, 
but  from  something  which  was  about  equally 
inherent  in  each  of  them,  something  which,  in 
spite  of  their  antagonisms,  somehow  edged 
itself  into  the  world.  It  is  this  something 
which  has  changed  the  world.  One  man  will 
say  that  this  element  is  the  influence  of  Christ, 

47 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION. 

another  that  it  is  due  to  an  escape  from  the 
influence  of  Christ,  still  another  that  it  comes 
through  learning,  or  through  industrial  prog- 
ress. It  is  impossible  to  define  these  influ- 
ences. We  can  only  see  that  the  whole  out- 
come has  arrived  as  the  operation  of  God, 
and  has  always  gone  forward  apparently 
against  the  will  of  everybody. 

It  is  then  not  without  relief  that  I  find  this 
Roman  question  lying  across  our  path  in 
America.  The  historic  continuity  of  mankind 
meets  us  here,  and  steers  us  back  to  ideas 
which  have  been  foreign  to  us  only  because  all 
ideas  have  been  foreign  to  us.  Behold,  we  are 
re-awakening  to  spiritual  and  religious  truth; 
and  we  find  ourselves  facing  the  very  matters 
which  occupied  us  before  we  fell  asleep. 


48 


II 


THE  EFFECT  OF  HEBRAIC  THOUGHT 
ON  WESTERN  EUROPE 

Consider  the  mixture  of  good  and  evil  in 
the  world,  and  how  we  can  never  quite  get 
an  unmixed  sample  of  either.  It  is  the  same 
with  truth  and  falsehood.  Our  statements  al- 
ways contain  a  little  of  each.  I  say  this  here 
because  I  would  not  have  the  folly  of  my 
words  caught  at — as  if  I  thought  to  scoop  up 
truth,  and  make  a  present  of  it  to  the  reader. 
Truth  is  something  which  glows  and  beckons, 
and,  at  times,  approaches  and  descends  upon 
us — encloses  and  possesses  us ;  but  it  remains 
a  mystery.  Those  profound  sayings  which 
appear  to  be  absolute  strands  of  living  truth 
always  profess  themselves  to  be  mere  symbols. 
It  was  the  Jew  who  discovered  God ;  and 
Christ,  who  re-delivered  God  to  us,  was  a  Jew. 
A  Jew,  yet  much  more  than  a  Jew.  The 
ancient  Hebrew  race  knew  religion,  and  laid 
the  foundations  for  morality,  as  the  Greeks 
did  for  the  fine  arts.     No  one  has  added  a 

49 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

line  to  the  Bible,  whether  to  the  Old  or  to  the 
New  Testament.  Whence  comes  this  natural 
ascendancy  in  spiritual  matters,  this  insight, 
which  the  ancient  Jew  possessed?  Perhaps 
it  comes  from  racial,  ancestral,  age-long  pre- 
occupation. The  Semitic  wise  men  had  been 
handling  these  themes  for  thousands  of  years. 
Certainly  the  book  of  Job  exhibits  a  school 
of  practical  ethics  that  runs  straight  up  into 
celestial  speculation — showing  a  gamut  of 
thought  and  a  vigor  of  expression  that  have 
never  since  been  reached — except  by  the  Jew. 
The  God  of  the  Jews  was  at  first  a  racial 
God ;  but  the  mind  of  the  Jew  was  stronger 
than  his  patriotism,  and  by  degrees  the  racial 
idea  of  piety  was  supplanted  by  a  universal 
idea.  All  through  the  Old  Testament  we  find 
the  thought  of  Jehovah  cracking  the  old  Mo- 
saic Dispensation.  You  can  see  the  seams 
in  it  here  and  there,  from  Genesis  onward. 
A  Universe  has  been  discerned  through  the 
rifts,  and  wine  has  broken  the  cask.  Also,  in 
the  New  Testament,  Christ's  power  shatters 
the  whole  structure  of  the  Mosaic  Dispensa- 
tion till  you  can  hardly  find  the  frame  work; 
and  yet  the  adumbration  of  a  Christ  has  been 
at  the  back  of  that  Jewish  Theology.  The 
New  Testament,  without  the  Old,  can  be  but 
half-comprehended.      The    very    figures    of 

50 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

speech  are  the  same  in  each,  and  half  of 
Christ's  thought  is  to  be  found  in  Moses. 

Let  us  now  turn,  almost  at  random,  to  the 
sayings  of  the  Jews,  and  examine  a  few  of 
the  metaphors  of  this  old  Wisdom,  in  order 
to  illustrate  the  intellectual  heights  at  which 
these  Semitic  thinkers  habitually  walked. 
"The  battle  is  not  to  the  strong,  neither  is 
the  race  to  the  swift.  The  stone  which  the 
builders  rejected  has  become  the  head  of  the 
corner.  ...  As  thou  knowest  not  what  is 
the  way  of  the  spirit,  nor  how  the  bones  do 
grow  in  the  womb  of  her  that  is  with  child : 
even  so  thou  knowest  not  the  works  of  God 
who  maketh  all." 

With  all  this  profundity,  with  all  this  human 
feeling,  there  is  never  a  note  of  falsetto  in 
Jewish  sentiment.  The  poetry  of  the  Psalms 
and  of  the  Prophets  touches  many  kinds  of 
religious  feeling — joyous,  sad,  mystic,  impas- 
sioned, elegiac;  yet  it  is  always  robust.  The 
straining  after  religious  emotion  which  char- 
acterizes Christianity  in  Western  Europe  was 
not  seen  in  Isaiah.  If  you  contrast  any  page 
of  mediaeval  piety  with  a  page  of  the  Psalms, 
or  contrast  any  legend  or  anecdote  out  of 
the  Middle  Ages  with  one  from  the  New 
Testament,  you  will  find  that  the  desire  to 
experience  religion  is  what  characterizes  Eu- 

51 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

ropean  Christianity.  This  straining  after  emo- 
tion began  in  the  earUest  Christian  era.  You 
might  say  that  this  note  of  hysteric  feeHng  is 
one  of  the  immediate  effects  which  Jewish 
thought  produced  upon  the  Gentile  nature. 
Jewish  thought  was  hke  a  strong  brew  that 
upset  the  stomach  of  less  hardy  men.  How 
could  the  Roman  colonist  Augustine,  living 
under  the  African  sun,  digest  the  fiery  doc- 
trine of  Israel  and  yet  retain  the  phlegm  of 
Israel?  The  metaphysics  of  the  Hebrew  put 
Europe  to  its  purgation;  and,  down  to  quite 
recent  times — yes,  down  almost  to  yesterday — 
the  Western  brain  has  been  turned  by  this 
Eastern  drug:  the  drug  drives  us  mad.  The 
point  at  which  this  general  tendency  towards 
emotionalism  climaxed  was  the  Roman  Mass. 
Catholics  say  that  no  Protestant  can  have  any 
understanding  of  the  mystical  experience 
which  is  theirs  at  every  celebration  of  the 
Mass.  The  Mass,  they  say,  is  the  Secret  of 
the  Church's  life,  and  this  living  foundation 
of  power  is  what  vitalizes  the  church  and 
keeps  it  in  motion.  There  is  much  truth  in 
this  claim.  The  good  Catholic  can  find  the 
centre  and  focus  of  his  emotional  nature  at  a 
moment's  notice.  He  has  a  short  cut  to  reli- 
gious experience.  He  has  but  to  go  to  church 
and  instantly  he  gets  rid  of  his  mind  and  walks 

52 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

into  his  feelings.  He  leaves  his  intellectual 
part  at  the  church  door;  and  if  there  is  any- 
thing left  of  his  intellect  as  he  walks  up  the 
aisle,  he  lays  it  on  the  altar.  The  problems  of 
his  growing  mind  are  dismissed — for  does  he 
not  hold  truth  already?  By  a  single  act  of 
submission  he  gains  the  consolations  of  reli- 
gion, which  are,  I  believe,  all  the  more  poig- 
nant because  they  are  focalized,  localized, 
dramatized  and  superinduced  by  a  ritual. 

Let  each  one  of  us  remember  the  moments 
of  religious  exaltation  that  come  to  us — some- 
times years  apart.  Let  us  recall  the  thought 
that  rose  in  our  minds  at  such  times,  "If  I 
could  but  find  my  way  back  to  this  place  I 
should  be  a  religious  person."  And  the  Catho- 
lic conceives  that  he  has  found  the  way  back. 
No  wonder,  then,  that  he  adores  his  ritual. 
What  he  does  not  understand  is  that  some  part 
of  his  emotion  is  due  to  a  paralysis  of  por- 
tions of  his  nature.  One  place  in  which  this 
paralysis  shows  is  in  his  conversation.  His 
talk  is  controlled.  He  himself  does  not  know 
how  much  he  may  utter  without  a  breach  of 
discipline.  In  this  regard  Catholicism  is  very 
unlike  the  old  Hebrew  dispensation  which 
gave  men  tongues. 

The  truth  seems  to  be  that  man  ought  not 
to  expect  frequent  or  continuous  experiences 

53 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

of  emotional  religion.  If  they  come  like  the 
thief  in  the  night  it  is  well ;  but  human  nature 
is  so  made  that  the  true  revelations  cannot 
be  counted  upon  nor  controlled,  and  that  the 
simulacra  or  counterfeits  of  them  are  always 
bought  at  a  sacrifice.  This  was  what  the  old 
Hebrews  knew,  and  what  western  Europe  has 
never  known  but  is  beginning  to  find  out. 
That  madness  and  passion,  that  search  for 
sensation  and  sensationalism,  for  rapture  and 
for  felt-piety — that  use  of  Judah  as  a  drug — 
is  what  for  a  time  enslaved  western  Europe. 
The  temporal  power  of  the  papacy  rested 
upon  it. 

We  have  seen  how  easily  the  political- 
minded  Romans  made  use  of  the  new  religion 
in  ruling  their  Empire.  Do  not  blame  them. 
They  could  no  nothing  else,  under  their  sys- 
tem. In  fact,  they  themselves  became  the 
creatures  of  the  new  system.  The  temptation 
to  monopolize  the  new  source  of  feeling  was 
not  recognized  as  a  temptation  at  all.  It 
resulted  from  a  sincere  illusion  on  all  hands — 
the  illusion,  namely,  that  the  interests  of  the 
Empire  were  identical  with  those  of  truth. 
That  illusion  persists  to-day;  and  every  Prot- 
estant ought  to  remember  this  fact  in  dealing 
with  the  Catholic  question.  In  the  early  days 
the  German  tribes  were  converted  wholesale ; 

54 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

the  world  was  dealt  with  roundly.  There  was 
to  be  no  other  power  except  Rome,  whether 
spiritual  or  temporal.  "Subdued"  is  the  word : 
Rome  subdued  the  world. 

There  is  a  pathological  element  in  Roman 
Catholic  piety.  The  good  Catholic  knows  re- 
ligion ;  but  in  the  learning  of  it  a  nerve  in  his 
stomach  has  been  depressed,  the  Church  must 
hold  his  hand  or  he  sinks.  His  consolation 
will  be  taken  from  him,  his  throbbing  sense  of 
God's  presence  will  leave  him,  he  is  a  lost 
soul  if  he  separates  himself  from  the  Church. 
Therefore  he  clings  and  hangs,  therefore  he 
submits  and  recants.  The  truth  is  that  he  has 
been  enjoying  a  more  acute  sense  of  his  near- 
ness to  God  than  he  could  have  experienced 
without  the  use  of  a  drug.  Sensationalism, 
while  seeming  to  increase  his  faith,  has  really 
undermined  it.  I  am  using  strong  language 
in  order  to  bring  out  a  difficult  idea.  Let 
the  reader  make  allowances.  A  man's  faith 
is  enfeebled  when  he  requires  to  be  feeling, 
to  be  feeling  his  nearness  to  God. 

The  ear-mark  of  mediaeval  devotion  is  a 
preoccupation  with  the  state  of  one's  soul — a 
sort  of  medical  interest  in  one's  soul.  The 
Jews  were  either  not  subject  to  the  evapora- 
tion of  faith — the  occasional  coldness,  flatness 
and  loss  of  the  sense  of  religion,  from  which 

55 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

the  mediaeval  Christian  suffered — or  else  the 
Jews  had  philosophy  enough  to  wait  quietly 
till  faith  returned,  and  artistic  sensibility 
enough  to  refrain  from  writing  about  them- 
selves in  the  meanwhile.  Even  their  peniten- 
tial Psalms  are  unselfconscious.  The  eye  of 
the  sinner  is  on  God,  rather  than  on  himself. 
The  mediaeval  Christian,  however,  is  a  vale- 
tudinarian. 

The  mediaeval  sentiment  in  regard  to  pain 
and  suffering,  to  repentance  and  purgation  is 
tinctured  with  excess.  The  desire  to  ex- 
perience emotion  leads  in  his  case  to  some- 
thing very  like  a  disease,  to  which  I  can  find 
no  analogy  in  Israel  nor  in  Christ.  We  know 
that  suffering  is  generally  involved  in  moral 
advance,  that  God  is  often  the  celestial  sur- 
geon, as  Stevenson  says.  This  is  one  of  the 
great  facts  of  life.  But  for  us  to  clutch  the 
knife  and  hug  pain  is  an  idea  which  I  cannot 
find  in  the  New  Testament  nor  in  the  Old.  It 
comes  out  of  Darkest  Christendom.  Philo- 
sophic historians  tell  us  that  this  tendency  of 
the  mediaeval  temperament  to  embrace  pain 
reflects  the  misery  and  degradation  of  the  ages 
just  after  Constantine,  during  which  civiliza- 
tion was  being  lost  and  despair  was  every- 
where dominant.  But  I  rather  think  that  this 
emotional  view  of  religion  was  adopted  as  a 

56 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

short  cut  to  sanctity.  We  see  evidences  of  it 
in  the  very  earliest  days  of  Christianity. 

A  striving  towards  salvation  seems  to  have 
come  into  the  world  as  the  immediate  conse- 
quence of  Christ's  teaching.  There  is  an  un- 
pleasant flavor  in  this  notion  that  men  are  to 
get  something  for  themselves  out  of  truth — 
even  salvation.  And  yet  this  idea  seized  and 
occupied  the  world  from  St.  Paul  to  Pascal. 
Schemes  of  salvation,  theories  of  soul-saving 
fill  the  books.  These  Christians  appear  to  be 
after  something,  like  carp  about  bread  crumbs. 

It  is  a  common  experience  in  settlement 
work,  (as  it  is  in  family  life)  to  find  selfish- 
ness in  the  children  often  springing  up  as  the 
result  of  pure  unselfish  care  for  them  on  the 
part  of  parents  and  guardians.  The  young 
ones  get  a  notion  of  their  own  importance  and 
they  play  the  game.  I  am  reminded  of  this 
when  I  remember  the  divine  solicitude  of 
Christ  over  the  welfare  of  men's  souls,  and 
then  watch  the  spirit  in  which  Christ's  follow- 
ers soon  took  up  the  work  of  saving  their  own. 

This  desire  to  secure  salvation,  this  desire 
to  experience  religion  led  men  to  submit  to 
regimens  that  should  bring  on  the  reaction 
and,  of  course,  the  means  of  superinducing 
it  became  a  part  of  ritual.  As  time  went  on 
this  means  worked  in   well  with  the  confes- 

57 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

sional,  the  rack,  the  Inquisition  and  the  other 
devices  for  bringing  men  into  conformity 
through  appeals  to  sensation  and  sensational- 
ism. The  priesthood  adopted  theories  of  sal- 
vation and  summas  of  philosophy :  it  wove 
nets  to  catch  men,  Christ  became  obscured 
in  a  labyrinth  of  rules  and  practices  as  to  how 
to  get  at  him,  and  dogmas  as  to  what  he  is. 
There  were,  as  we  have  seen,  really  two  mo- 
tive powers  at  work  in  the  loom  that  wove  this 
fabric : — first,  individual  piety  in  the  western 
mind,  seeking  a  thread  to  lead  it  towards  the 
light;  and  second.  Church  organization  hold- 
ing these  threads. 

All  of  these  debasements  of  Christ's  teach- 
ing— the  emotionalism,  the  search  for  salva- 
tion, the  invention  of  shibboleths — were  parts 
of  the  instrumentation  through  which  the 
lower,  less  complex,  and  more  sensuous  intelli- 
gence of  Europe  made  Jewish  thought  compre- 
hensible to  itself.  The  Roman  Church, 
through  the  fact  that  it  was  a  government,  thus 
became  the  agent  during  a  great  many  hun- 
dred years  in  oversensitizing  its  people  in  a 
particular  manner,  and  in  superinducing  cer- 
tain specific  religious  experiences.  In  course 
of  time  those  evils  resulted,  whose  gross  ex- 
terior form  became  known  to  all  the  world 
through  the  Reformation.    A  tremendous  re- 

58 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

vulsion  followed  the  exposure  of  abuses,  and 
the  Church  lost  ground. 

In  reviewing  the  whole  matter  we  can  see 
that  the  mediaeval  belief  that  pain  is  something 
meritorious,  and  that  it  can  be  manipulated  in 
such  a  way  as  to  bring  on  salvation  is  not  in 
Christ's  teaching.  It  is  plain  that  any  recipe 
which  ensures  piety — like  any  recipe  which 
makes  art  easy — weakens  piety — or  art.  The 
absence  of  any  such  recipe  from  the  Gospels 
is  the  most  striking  thing  in  them.  The  Lord's 
Prayer  is  the  only  formular  of  devotion  which 
one  can  find  in  the  New  Testament ;  and  this 
prayer  is  not  insisted  upon.  It  seems  to  have 
been  given  by  Christ  to  his  followers  in  a  re- 
sponse to  a  demand,  and  was  probably  Christ's 
own  personal  prayer.  With  regard  to  pain, 
all  theories  which  regard  pain  as  the  parent  of 
piety  imply  a  knowledge  of  our  own  needs 
which  we  do  not  possess.  We  do  not  know 
whether  we  stand  in  need  of  pain  or  not.  Let 
us  hope  we  do  not  need  it ;  but  let  us  accept  it 
if  it  comes. 


59 


Ill 

THE   INDESTRUCTIBILITY  OF 
RELIGION 

Everybody  is  afraid  that  Religion  will  be 
lost.  This  is  the  reason  always  given  for 
every  unpleasant  thing  done  in  the  name  of 
God.  The  Protestants  and  Catholics  alike 
fought  out  their  wars  of  religion  with  the 
same  end  in  view.  They  were  and  are  exactly 
alike  in  their  determination  to  save  religion 
and  hold  up  the  hands  of  God.  Let  us  con- 
sider the  Reformation. 

In  historic  retrospects  we  must  occasionally 
take  in  at  one  sweeping  glance  a  very  long 
period  of  time,  and  review  the  life  of  the  race 
as  if  it  were  the  life  of  one  man.  Humanity 
is,  indeed,  like  a  mammoth  man  who  requires 
a  thousand  years  to  go  through  spiritual 
changes  which  perhaps  in  the  individual  might 
take  place  in  a  decade.  We  have  seen  that 
from  the  very  beginning  there  was  a  sickly 
note  in  European  Christianity,  a  note  of  self- 
commiserating    emotionalism    hardly    to    be 

60 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

found  in  Judea  or  in  the  classic  world.  After 
a  thousand  years  of  this  a  reaction  set  in. 
The  inhabitants  of  Western  Europe,  having 
tasted  of  the  terrible  truths  of  Hebrew  thought 
and  having  been  made  very  ill  by  them,  began, 
during  the  Reformation,  to  cast  off  the  church 
and  to  re-examine  the  Bible.  It  looked  as  if 
the  whole  of  the  Hebrew  dispensation  were  to 
be  thrown  overboard  and  as  if  the  world 
would  return  to  the  chaos  of  Paganism. 
Everyone  agreed  in  fearing  such  an  outcome. 
The  early  reformers  desired  to  retain  Juda- 
ism as  an  instrument  of  government;  but  to 
use  this  in  their  own  way. 

As  time  went  on  it  became  apparent 
that  there  was  no  getting  rid  of  Hebrew 
influence ;  you  might  discard  the  dispen- 
sation as  government,  but  it  remained  as 
philosophy,  as  ethics,  as  poetry,  as  municipal 
law.  It  existed  as  folk  lore  and  proverb; 
domestic  life  was  drenched  in  it.  The  illu- 
mination was  in  the  world.  Abuses  might 
obscure  it,  the  Reformation  might  obscure  it; 
but  there  was  some  indestructible  truth  behind 
all,  which  kept  boring  its  way  to  the  light. 


6i 


IV 

MEMORIES  AND  HALF-THOUGHTS 

It  is  easy  to  write  about  the  past,  especially 
about  remote  history  and  other  people's  ex- 
perience. But  to  speak  of  contemporary  mat- 
ters and  of  one's  own  relation  to  religion  is 
hard.  All  aids  and  props  are  withdrawn  at 
once  and  we  stand  in  mid-air.  The  fact  is 
that  no  man  knows  much  about  universal 
truth.  There  is  a  certain  self-delusion  in  all 
coherent  writing,  especially  about  religion.  It 
is  the  saying  of  a  little  more  than  a  man  knows 
that  makes  Theology:  all  those  great  tomes 
come  out  of  it.  And  yet  we  feel  sure  that 
every  fragment  of  religious  experience  is 
somehow  part  of  a  whole,  and  that  religion 
is  a  unity.  The  upshot  is  that  although  the 
fragments  are  undoubtedly  parts  of  a  whole, 
it  is  not  for  us  to  fit  them  together.  This  is 
the  very  thing  that  they  must  do  for  them- 
selves. 

Therefore  I  leave  these  little  scraps  of  es- 
says detached  and  helpless.    If  they  lack  the 

62 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

wit  and  vitality  to  order  themselves  into  a  sys- 
tem I  could  never  help  them  by  any  lumbering 
endeavour  at  philosophic  coherence. 


DO    NOT    GO    IN    SEARCH    OF    RELIGION 

The  Illumination  is  in  the  world.  We 
receive  it  with  the  prejudices  of  our  educa- 
tion and  our  geography,  with  the  million  fold 
half-lights  of  philosophy  and  sentiment  play- 
ing about  it,  with  the  atmospheres  of  nineteen 
centuries  shrouding  it  and  the  intimate  feel- 
ings of  our  own  personal  history  hallowing  it. 
Is  it  likely  then  that  any  man's  account  of 
such  a  matter  will  be  final?  God  forbid.  Yet 
I  will  speak  of  things  which  strike  me  now  as 
true. 

During  the  last  one  thousand  years  we  have 
learned  one  thing — that  no  matter  how  ar- 
dently a  man  may  wish  for  a  conscious  unity 
with  God  he  must  never  seek  it  except  directly 
from  God.  Man  is  not  to  be  tnistcd.  We 
ourselves  are  not  to  be  trusted.  Who  knows 
whether  this  experience,  religion,  be  meant 
for  us?  It  seems  as  if  they  who  wait  in  the 
ante-chamber    in    this    spirit    are    already    in 

63 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

the  Temple.  The  power  of  prayer,  the  mean- 
ing of  contemplation,  the  knowledge  of  spirit- 
ual things — as  of  strength,  intuition,  com- 
munion, healing — all  these  things  form  an 
ever-advancing  indoctrination  into  the  nature 
of  the  universe;  and  this  growing  wisdom  is 
in  its  very  essence  and  from  the  beginning 
something  done  to  us,  and  which  we  must 
not  seek  to  accelerate.  If  we  will  but  allow 
God  to  do  the  work  without  setting  up  a 
machine  of  our  own,  it  will  be  done  whole- 
somely and  we  ourselves  shall  become  robust. 
We  should  not  endeavor  to  bring  on  reli- 
gion in  ourselves  or  in  others.  The  temptation 
to  push  forward  in  some  direction,  or  to  push 
other  people  forward  towards  some  door,  is 
a  snare  of  self-will.  Through  this  zeal  we 
push  our  children  down  oubliettes.  All  our 
intervention  between  them  and  God  is  poison 
and  brings  on  hysteria.  The  thing  we  truly 
desire  must  operate  in  a  region  beyond  all 
personal  will,  like  the  attraction  of  the  moon. 
Cast  a  glance  at  the  moon  and  bid  her  reveal 
God  to  your  child;  commit  the  babe  to  the 
influence  of  Apollo,  with  awe  in  your  heart 
and  you  will  leave  the  child's  soul  more  open 
to  the  visitation  of  Christ  than  if  you  teach 
him  the  New  Testament  in  a  proselitizing 
spirit. 

64 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 


II 


TEACHING  A   CHILD 


When  your  child  is  young,  say  your  pray- 
ers with  him  and  teach  him  all  you  know — 
for  this  is  the  truest  church  of  Christ  and 
the  best  Apostolic  Succession.  But  even  then 
remember  that  this  is  but  yourself  that  you 
teach.  It  is  neither  Christ  himself  nor  the 
child  himself.  You  must  leave  them  together. 
Consider  that  Christ  was  powerless  to  guide 
or  protect  his  own  doctrines.  They  were 
seized  by  the  winds  of  heaven,  and  have,  at 
times,  been  used  to  make  men  into  devils. 
Even  so  are  you  powerless  concerning  your 
children's  fate.  Christ's  doctrines  have  not 
made  shipwreck  nor  been  lost ;  neither  will  it 
be  so  with  the  soul  of  your  boy. 

The  complexity  of  life  transcends  our  un- 
derstanding. Even  Christ  seems  to  have 
looked  for  a  simpler  solution — a  second  com- 
ing and  wind-up  of  some  sort.  But  the  world 
goes  on,  and  perhaps  we  ought  not  to  complain 
that  Christ  was  wrong  in  this  point ;  for  where 
should  we  have  been  if  the  Cosmos  had  come 
to  a  wind-up  during  the  first  century  A.  D.  ? 
But  the  truth  is  that  there  arc  in  the  New 

65 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

Testament  as  well  as  in  the  Old  bits  of  Semitic 
Cosmogony  that  are  not  for  us.  And  in  like 
manner  there  will  be  among  the  profoundest 
beliefs  of  any  one  of  us,  bits  of  personal  Cos- 
mogony that  are  true  for  us  but  not  for  our 
children. 

in 

INSTITUTIONS 

I  WILL  not  found  an  institution  nor  will  I 
pull  one  down.  Institutions  will  be  founded 
by  men  who  cannot  understand  this  doctrine; 
and  there  will  be  many  of  them.  As  I  see 
the  need  of  the  world  to-day  it  is  a  need  of 
depth  of  piety  and  of  quietude.  The  people 
are  becoming  like  paper  dolls.  They  need  life 
of  such  kind  as  can  only  pour  into  people's 
hearts  through  rest  and  prayer.  Shall  I  there- 
fore found  a  monastery  where  fifty  monks 
shall  forever  pray  day  and  night  for  the  health 
of  mankind  ?  No.  I  am  powerless  here,  too. 
The  health  must  be  given  by  the  greater  mira- 
cle and  according  to  its  own  law.  I  can  add 
nothing  by  my  contrivance  of  a  monastery. 
It  is  a  shallow  conceit.  The  monastery  exists 
already  and  I  have  my  cell  in  it:  I  will  pray 
in  my  cell. 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

Is  not  all  this  matter  a  matter  of  symbols? 
Let  every  man  use  what  symbols  his  own 
education  requires  and  change  them  as  his 
education  advances;  and  let  him  accord  to 
other  people  a  like  liberty.  The  patriarch's 
need  was  served  by  a  pile  of  stones.  When 
Abraham  worshipped  he  required  but  a  rude 
altar.  Out  of  it  there  grew  the  middle  ages. 
You  and  I  are  just  emerging  from  those  mid- 
dle ages  and  find  our  minds  filled  with  its 
practices.  Certain  saints  and  certain  skeptics 
agree  upon  the  need  of  symbols,  and  when 
saint  and  skeptic  agree  it  is  supposed  they  must 
be  right.  Yet  here  both  may  be  wrong.  The 
saint  finds  symbols  close  to  his  heart;  the 
skeptic  sees  them  close  to  the  saint's  heart. 
Neither  saint  nor  skeptic  can  put  a  scalpel  be- 
tween the  symbol  and  Faith ;  and  yet  this  is 
what  Time  does  so  easily. 

Symbols  are  the  outcome,  not  the  cause,  of 
religion.  They  live  as  long  as  faith  lives : 
they  die  as  faith  dies.  To  perpetuate  them 
for  theoretic  reasons  is  wrong.  Let  love  per- 
petuate them ;  and  they  will  last  as  long  as 
they  ought  to  last.  I  believe  that  if  we  could 
see  the  invisible  church  as  it  actually  exists 
in  the  interlacing  of  all  men  in  God  and  with 
each  other  through  the  force  that  makes  them 
live,  the   alarm   of   those  who  are   fostering 

67 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

religion  for  fear  it  will  die  out  would  appear 
ridiculous. 


IV 

MANY    MANSIONS 

We  all  live  in  many  houses  which  exist,  one 
inside  of  the  other,  and  unite  us  with  different 
worlds.  There  is  the  House  of  Art,  the  House 
of  History,  the  House  of  Philanthropy,  the 
House  of  Philosophy.  There  is  the  House  of 
our  Social  Caste,  the  House  of  Business,  the 
House  of  Pleasure,  the  House  of  Grief.  And 
outside  of  all  there  is  the  Mansion  of  Reli- 
gion. This  mansion,  to  those  who  perceive  it, 
encloses  all  the  rest. 

The  New  Testament  lies  before  us  at  first 
as  a  cryptogram.  But  as  we  read  it  and  grow 
into  it,  it  begins  to  make  the  walls  and  roof 
of  our  inner  house  transparent,  so  that  we 
perceive  the  outer  structure.  It  enters  like  a 
thief  and  substitutes  here  and  there  windows 
for  wall  space.  It  deals  with  no  two  natures 
alike;  and  its  operations  are  as  much  beyond 
our  ken  and  understanding  as  the  nature  of 
the  stars.  It  speaks  only  in  paradoxes ;  yet 
they  seem  to  come  from  the  truth  at  the  basis 
of  all  things,  and  to  feed  the  core  of  us. 

68 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

The  miraculousness  which  we  sometimes 
find  in  art  is  seen  also  here  and  there  in 
metaphysics ;  for  the  cryptogram  passes  over 
and  fixes  itself  in  the  heavens  and  in  the  heart. 
It  is  become  a  part  of  the  universe.  It  is 
everywhere. 


THE    WORDS    OF    CHRIST 

A  talisman  is  something  which  seems  to 
be  a  word.  The  memory  apprehends  it,  the 
lips  utter  it.  Yet  in  reality  it  is  a  silent  thun- 
derbolt, and  leaves  behind  its  passage  a  gash 
in  the  cliff.  So  the  story  of  Christ  and  the 
words  of  Christ  are  accepted  by  children  as  if 
they  were  comprehensible.  We  lisp  them  as 
infants.  Yet  behind  them  flock  ever  new 
meanings.  They  hold  a  door  open  and  show 
us  hosts  and  distances,  and  powers  and  mira- 
cles, and  finally  the  Might  of  the  Universe. 
And  yet  before  us  lies  merely  the  little  book. 

You  cannot  hold  this  fire  at  arm's  length ; 
for  it  runs  up  your  arm  and  takes  possession 
of  the  brain.  You  are  become  incandescent. 
The  doctrines  of  Christ  perpetuate  the  old 
Jewish  idea  that  God  was  one  continuous 
power — being  all  the  life  in  the  universe.    So 

69 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

that  all  men  became  as  one,  transmitting  and 
reflecting  that  power  and  becoming  themselves 
perfected  by  submission  and  damaged  by  any 
form  of  opposition  to  the  force.  Christ  takes 
up  this  idea,  and  illustrates  it  in  domestic  and 
social  life;  in  the  life  of  personal  religion. 
Man  can  by  self-will  do  nothing  except  injure 
both  himself  and  others.  If  he  will  abandon 
his  will  to  God  the  miraculous  nature  of  life 
will  assert  itself  and  make  him  wholesome. 
Disease  and  sin  are  viewed  as  one  thing. 


VI 

MODERN    SCIENCE    AND    CHRISTIAN    SCIENCE 

Modern  Science  has  by  devious  routes  ar- 
rived at  the  idea  that  space  is  filled  with  infi- 
nite power.  And  Christian  Science  must  be 
given  the  credit  for  proclaiming  the  same 
thought.  Contemporary  medicine  is  on  the 
verge  of  seeing  that  health  is  relaxation,  and 
all  danger  whether  to  mind  or  body  is  due  to 
nervous  tension.  Any  purpose  or  intention  of 
mind  is  a  variety  of  quasi-contradiction.  The 
injurious  and  untrue  part  of  Christian  Science 
consists  in  its  militancy,  its  purpose.  It 
teaches  self -advancement,  and  thus  becomes  a 

70 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

mockery  and  an  introversion  of  religion.  To 
say  to  oneself  "It  is  the  will  of  God  that  I 
shall  recover  from  my  sickness,"  or  "It  is  the 
will  of  God  that  I  shall  prosper  in  business," 
is  contradiction  in  terms.  No  one  can  be  an 
orthodox  Christian  Scientist  unless  his  mind 
is  a  little  muddled.  He  believes  that  a  thing 
can  be  and  yet  not  be.  It  is  God's  will  and 
yet  perhaps  it  isn't.  Christian  Science  thus 
splits  on  the  same  rock  that  the  Roman  Church 
does,  namely,  the  temptation  to  make  use  of 
Christ  as  an  applied  force,  i.  e.,  to  build  up 
a  church  through  the  bold  statement  of  a 
paradox.  But  Christ's  power  comes  behind 
and  pulls  down  Christian  Science  with  the 
same  ease  with  which  it  has  pulled  down 
greater  things.  Nevertheless,  and  in  spite  of 
its  crudities,  I  am  grateful  to  Christian  Sci- 
ence. In  its  historic  aspect  it  was  the  portal 
to  a  new  view  of  old  truth.  The  whole  of 
modern  life  is  in  debt  to  it;  just  as  in  an 
infinitely  deeper  sense  the  whole  of  modern 
life  is  in  historic  debt  to  the  church  of  Rome. 
Through  all  the  churches,  and  through  all 
humanity  outside  the  churches  there  has  re- 
cently coursed  a  new  sense  of  the  nearness  of 
God.  We  have  become  natural  men  once 
more.  The  powers  and  mysteries  which  over- 
cloud   Humanity   have   been    restored   to   us. 

71 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

We  are  re-united  with  the  past,  not  merely 
with  the  last  eighteen  centuries  of  Christianity 
or  the  last  four  thousand  years  of  Jewish  in- 
fluence, but  with  the  great  past,  which  every- 
where gleams  with  the  miraculous,  and  which 
through  this  gleam  is  sanctified  and  made 
human.  When  I  think  of  the  Agnostics  of 
1850,  and  of  the  kiln-dried  philosophic  epoch 
of  my  own  youth,  I  feel  like  one  who  has 
escaped  with  his  soul  alive  from  the  burning 
ruins  of  Sodom  and  Gomorrah, 


VII 

THE    MESSAGE   OF   CHRISTIANITY 

The  world  has  survived  many  kinds  of 
Christianity.  Why  is  it  that  we  cannot  sur- 
vive Christ  himself,  and  come  to  the  bottom 
of  his  influence?  Why  is  it,  that  having 
created  the  Middle  Ages  through  one  kind  of 
partial  comprehension  which  endured  for  one 
thousand  years,  he  is  now  creating  a  new 
civilization  through  the  new  kinds  of  partial 
comprehension  which  will  certainly  qualify  the 
next  thousand  years?  The  reason  is  that  the 
birth  of  truth  which  came  through  Christ  is 
fuller  than  our  own  account  of  it.     His  life 

72 


NOTES    ON   RELIGION 

gives  truth  accurately,  our  statements  weakly 
and  inaccurately.  Any  philosophic  abstrac- 
tions written  down  give,  as  it  were,  a  chemical 
statement  of  things  as  they  do  not  exist. 
Christ  in  the  New  Testament  by  his  character, 
conduct  and  words  gives  the  bread  and  meat 
in  which  chemistry  is  lost  in  reality.  Bread 
will  endure  till  the  end  of  the  world. 

Whatever  it  was  that  Christ  signified,  the 
idea  required  for  its  deliverance  the  totality 
of  Christ  himself.  It  is  more  than  a  philoso- 
phy. It  will  not  remain  written  on  a  slate. 
It  cannot  be  read  in  a  book.  It  is  gradually 
delivering  itself  in  the  course  of  the  centuries 
through  the  bodies  and  souls  of  men. 


VIII 


THE    MYSTICAL    BODY    OF    CHRIST 

Was  the  very  nature  of  life  in  the  universe 
changed  through  Christ's  existence,  or  by  his 
life?  We  do  not  know  enough  about  the 
nature  of  life  to  say:  but  it  is  quite  probable. 
All  that  we  know  about  God  is  his  continuity, 
backward  and  forward,  up  and  down  and 
across.  The  element  of  time  being  illusory, 
like  the  emptiness  of  space,  it  is  very  likely 
that  the  nature  of  Being  is  qualified  by  every 

73 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

event,  and  of  life  by  every  life.  How  can  it 
be  otherwise? 

There  are  many  people  who,  like  Phillips 
Brooks,  not  to  speak  of  all  the  Catholic  saints, 
actually  feel  Christ  in  their  bosoms.  It  has 
of  recent  years,  I  mean  during  the  last  few 
decades  of  skepticism,  become  a  mental  habit 
for  people  to  classify  such  experiences  as 
illusory.  But  the  reality  of  continuous  power 
cannot  be  called  an  illusion.  The  most  unlike 
and  most  invisible  things  go  hand  in  hand  in 
human  history;  and  some  kind  of  mysticism  is 
always  a  motive  power  in  human  affairs.  The 
saint  seems  to  be  an  absurd  person  to  those 
who  are  not  in  the  secret ;  yet  the  saint  always 
has  enormous  practical  influence.  Why  should 
any  sensible  man  turn  his  attention  even  for 
a  moment  upon  Francis  of  Assisi?  Yet  Fran- 
cis is  today  commonly  regarded  as  the  Father 
of  the  Renaissance.  The  truth  is  that  after 
the  fact  the  scientist  accepts  with  complacency 
the  most  outrageous  violations  of  his  theory. 
He  says  it  was  long  ago;  men  were  different 
then,  etc.  The  miraculous  nature  of  ordinary 
life  is  a  thing  not  perceived  by  these  people  in 
regard  to  their  own  times.  They  perceive  it 
in  the  past  and  explain  it  by  reference  to 
the  unknown. 

I  remember  thinking  Phillips  Brooks  an  ab- 

74 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

surd  figure  with  his  Christ  in  his  bosom,  a 
deceived  person  who  went  about  exhorting  the 
world  and  deceiving  others.  And  now  I  see 
him  as  a  man  through  whose  bosom  passed 
the  axis  of  an  indestructible  force,  which 
joined  him  with  all  men.  This  is  the  true 
church  of  Christ.  It  was  Christ  that  revealed 
this  structure  which  passes  between  man  and 
man,  and  it  is  his  influence  that  keeps  reveal- 
ing it  freshly.  I  am  not  offended  if  you  call 
this  river  of  life — this  immortal  core  of  God- 
head— the  mystical  body  of  Christ,  so  long  as 
you  leave  it  there  nakedly  in  the  universe 
and  do  not  try  to  clap  a  cover  on  it  or  claim 
it  for  your  sect.  All  men  are  part  of  it ;  nor 
is  there  any  belief,  conduct  or  experience 
through  which  a  man  can  forfeit  his  member- 
ship in  it. 


IX 


THE   SALVATION    ARMY.       TOLSTOI.       NIETZSCHE 

TTie  numerous  and  good  evangelists  who 
smite  the  drunkard  with  "Jesus  loves  thee!" 
and  thereby  in  a  moment  relax  the  cords  of 
his  heart,  are  not — what  they  seem — mere  men 
of  a  phrase.  You  and  I  cannot  lift  their  di- 
vining-rod. They  are  vessels  of  fire.  Through 

75 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

their  hand  flows  a  force  that  scarifies  the  sin- 
ner's viscera,  and  brings  back  his  flesh  as  the 
flesh  of  a  child. 

There  have  always  been  men  of  personal 
gift,  who  could  fix  a  focus  upon  the  hearts  of 
their  fellowmen.  Christ  was  not  the  first  to 
do  this  kind  of  miracle.  But  Christ  showed 
the  norm  and  principle  at  the  bottom  of  the 
matter.  His  influence  grinds  men's  souls  into 
lenses. 

Christianity  swallowed  up  all  other  religions 
in  Western  Europe  and  one  cannot  find  a  sam- 
ple of  a  saint  except  a  Christian  saint.  So 
we  are  all  creatures  of  Christ.  (I  am  speak- 
ing here  historically — as  one  might  say,  "every 
European  musician  today  is  a  creature  of 
Bach.")  The  Anchorites  and  Evangelists, 
the  Abbots  and  the  Popes,  yes,  even  the  Abbes 
and  Court  confessors  are  more  or  less  distant 
echoes  and  caricatures  of  Christ.  Think  of 
Charlemagne  and  his  legend.  What  a  strange 
image  of  Christ  is  there  projected!  Could 
one  by  a  whole  life-time  of  contemplation 
catch  the  truth  about  any  one  epoch,  or  under- 
stand a  single  character  in  history — in  Chris- 
tian history — unless  one  were  familiar  with 
Christ  and  his  story?  All  these  men  are  but 
samples  and  side-lights  upon  Christ's  influ- 
ence.    Consider  Bunyan:  consider  Aquinas: 

76 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

consider  General  Booth.  The  historian,  unless 
he  deceived  himself,  would  fall  dead.  The  his- 
torian is  preserved  through  the  superficiality 
of  his  thought.  He  writes  a  chapter  on  Pascal 
and  goes  out  to  lunch.  Pascal  indeed! — what 
a  complexity  of  intellectual  power,  of  sick- 
ness, beauty,  error,  heroism.  The  world  is 
full  of  these  incalculable  and  shooting  forms 
of  genius  that  have  been  released  through 
Christ's  thought,  and  circulate  often  elliptic- 
ally  like  erring  meteors. 

But  what  I  was  about  to  say  is  this,  that  the 
crystallization  of  Christianity  into  government 
which  began  in  Augustine's  time  and  climaxed 
with  Innocent  III,  had  the  eflFect  of  petrifying 
and  sealing  up  many  forms  of  Christ's  influ- 
ence which  have  since  broken  loose  amid  the 
downfall  of  the  old  ecclesiastical  regime.  The 
New  Testament  influence  during  the  centuries 
since  the  Reformation  has  been  filling  the 
world  with  new  kinds  of  Christ — a  Christ  of 
hospitals,  of  toleration,  of  benevolence  and 
brotherhood,  in  the  extremest  case,  a  Christ 
without  theology.  I  see  this  man  today  walk- 
ing about  on  all  sides  of  us  and  blessing  the 
world.  He  is  as  certainly  a  product  of  Chris- 
tian influence  as  was  Saint  liernard. 

His  power  of  utterance  is  weak,  because  he 
does  not  recognize  the  source  of  his  own  be- 

11 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

liefs.  He  uses  blunted  words  and  factory- 
planed  ideas.  His  song  is  prose.  What  he 
means  can  only  be  said  in  Hebrew;  and  he 
has  forsworn  the  language.  Yet  through  all 
his  ground  glass  shines  Christ's  teaching  and 
Christ's  feeling.  When  I  see  one  of  these  men 
throwing  his  life  into  service  I  say,  Hath  not 
this  man  cast  in  more  than  they  all? 

There  are  other  types  of  Christ's  influence 
which  modern  times  have  made  possible. 
There  is  the  great  fog-minded,  Promethean 
Tolstoi,  shifting  his  huge  limbs  in  vain  to 
find  ease  upon  his  crag.  There  is  Nietzsche, 
who  had  the  nature  of  a  saint,  but  who  could 
not  compass  the  role  of  Lucifer — Nietzsche, 
who  by  denying  the  light  tore  his  mind  into 
ribbons.  Both  of  these  men  are  examples  of 
the  power  of  Christ,  though  they  betray  it  in 
the  form  of  mental  ravage. 

Hebrew  thought  is  not  a  thing  to  be  toyed 
with  by  strong  men.  If  it  falls  askew  upon 
a  temperament  that  is  violent, — or  encounters 
on  the  bias  a  mind  incapable  of  philosophy, 
it  may  wreck  the  reason. 

Tolstoi's  religious  books,  with  their  tre- 
mendous emotion,  their  lack  of  training  in 
thought — lack  of  the  first  element  of  Hebrew 
thought — are  like  music  written  for  an  or- 
chestra by   a   barbarian   of  genius — terrible, 

78 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

contorted,  struggling  with  a  power  which 
swells  his  heart  to  bursting,  undisciplined ;  yet 
sincere,  human  and  expressive,  yes,  in  spite  of 
all  violations  and  shortcomings,  expressive  of 
Christ,  some  sort  of  a  Christ  who  is  tearing 
about  within  him.  Tolstoi  believes  in  submis- 
sion to  the  law  if  it  can  be  found.  He  sub- 
mits. He  is  childish  in  that  he  thinks  the  mat- 
ter is  simpler  than  it  can  be  made ;  he  would 
state  things  in  arithmetic  that  can  only  be 
expressed  by  the  higher  mathematics — and  he 
does  not  know  the  higher  mathematics :  he 
despises  calculus.  Thus,  in  accepting  the  New 
Testament,  (which  is,  indeed,  the  higher 
mathematics,)  he  transmutes  it  into  baby  talk. 
He  is  not  satisfied  unless  the  gospel  can  be 
fulfilled  by  wearing  wooden  buttons  on  his 
clothes  or  going  through  a  clumsy  regime  of 
some  sort. 

Tolstoi  is  a  little  like  a  very  early  Christian, 
like  St.  Augustine,  for  instance,  in  tiie  heat  of 
his  feelings  and  in  the  circumstance  that  He- 
brew thought  does  not  calm  but  excites  him. 
Tolstoi  had  no  early  philosophic  education,  and 
his  discovery  of  Christianity  came  like  a  vol- 
cano from  within  him. 

Nietzsche  had  almost  the  opposite  experi- 
ence. He  was  a  beautiful  and  holy  child, 
unwisely   pushed    in   religious   matters.      He 

79 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

passed  from  the  hothouse  of  domestic  piety 
straight  into  the  liothouse  of  University  so- 
phistication— into  theories  of  culture,  into 
wire-drawn  and  imaginative  Neo-Platonism. 
As  he  had  been  a  prize  holy-boy,  so  he  became 
a  prize  clever-professor,  and  sworn  enemy  to 
his  early  faiths.  The  heart  of  him,  unfed  by 
his  new  philosophies,  and  haunted  by  the 
memory  of  Christ,  begins  to  overflow  with 
feeling  and  finds  no  outlet.  It  seizes  the  door 
of  hate  as  an  issue  for  love,  manages  some- 
how to  cut  its  way  out  into  a  nightmare  of 
spiritual  truth  expressed  in  terms  of  false- 
hood, and  goes  insane  in  the  process.  Of  all 
the  victims  of  Hebrew  thought  Nietzsche  is 
the  saddest.  He,  the  most  sophisticated  man 
in  Europe,  digs  up  the  bugbears  of  his  early 
life  and  goes  mad  over  denouncing  them  in 
the  interests  of  truth.  He  discovers  that  most 
of  the  evils  in  the  modern  world  are  traceable 
to  Christ,  and  he  attacks  them  with  a  holy 
zeal  which  recalls  the  wars  of  Religion.  An 
element  of  fanatical  sanctity  is  in  him.  There 
can,  indeed,  be  no  question  that  to  certain 
natures  he  brought  inspiration ;  he  came  to 
them  as  a  spiritual  liberator.  So  complex 
are  the  forms  of  force,  and  the  symbols  which 
truth  hides  under. 

Both  of  these  two  ill-educated  men,  Tolstoi 

80 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

and  Nietzsche,  are  men  of  moral  genius.  Both 
of  them  feel  that  Christ  is  at  the  bottom  of 
the  whole  question.  But  Tolstoi  has  grasped 
the  Hebrew  idea  of  humility.  Tolstoi,  with 
all  his  surging,  is  a  meek  spirit.  He  recog- 
nizes that  man  is  in  himself  nothing,  that  our 
life  is  negative  and  that  there  is  no  power  in 
us.  Nietzsche,  on  the  other  hand,  confutes 
this  idea.  He  builds  a  whole  philosophy  on 
the  denial  of  it.  He  imagines  a  "superman" 
who  shall  do  and  be  one  knows  not  what. 
The  awful  reality  of  man's  helplessness  is  to 
him  a  malignant  illusion  which  must  be  dis- 
pelled. He  dedicates  his  life  to  destroy  this 
illusion.  Here  we  have  the  philosophic  error 
in  Nietzsche's  work.  In  magnifying  the  noth- 
ing, Man,  he  is  in  every  thought  exposing 
his  naked  breast  to  that  stream  of  invisible 
force  which,  when  meekly  received,  makes 
man  strong,  and,  when  opposed,  destroys  him. 
With  rigid  muscles  Nietzsche  holds  his  fore- 
head to  the  grindstone,  and  is  annihilated. 
Where  Moses  fell  on  his  face  Nietzsche  stands 
up  and  preaches  the  Superman.  His  sincerity 
canonizes  him  and  his  sad  history  is  a  monu- 
ment of  error ;  for  truth  is  justified  in  all  her 
children. 

Nietzsche's  life  gives  us  the  introversion  of 
sane  living.     With  his  egoism,  his  vanity,  and 

8i 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

his  drugs  he  re-enacts  the  tragedy  of  Ajax,  the 
tragedy  of  self-assertion.  He  thus  becomes  a 
symbol  which  points  to  universal  truth;  for 
there  is  no  crime  or  error  that  is  not  a  form 
of  self-will.  We  live  in  a  universe  whose 
development  we  cannot  assist,  save  by  accept- 
ing its  operations  as  wiser  than  we.  But  in 
so  far  as  our  will  becomes  dissolved  in  the 
acceptance  of  the  processes  of  God,  great  pow- 
ers are  momentarily  released,  and  all  the 
wheels  turn  freely.  The  goal  of  our  desire 
can  be  accomplished  only  through  our  resigna- 
tion of  it. 

Discussions  on  Free  Will  generally  result  in 
a  deadlock;  because  the  nature  of  Will  itself 
is  not  considered.  Will  is  not  a  steady  and 
constant  quantity ;  but  a  fluctuating  current 
which  changes  in  the  act  and  process  of 
thought.  What  I  willed  yesterday  I  see  was 
illusion.  As  our  vision  widens  our  will  dimin- 
ishes ;  if  we  could  see  all  our  will  would  fall 
to  zero.  Force  is  released  through  our  pa- 
tience and  we  are  strong  only  through  weak- 
ness. This  is  the  paradox  in  our  nature. 
There  may  be  minds  of  such  sort  that  the 
statement  of  the  paradox  brings  conversion ; 
but  to  most  men  conversion  comes  through 
experiences  which  are  very  subtle ;  philosophy 
cannot  track  them. 

82 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

If  one  should  ask  why  it  is  that  Christ's 
influence  so  reorganizes  people,  what  it  is  in 
him  that  gives  life  to  the  Salvation  Army, 
arouses  Tolstoi,  draws  Nietzsche  on  like  a 
magnet  and  inspires  the  millions  of  people  in 
whom  we  see  Him  working,  it  might  be  an- 
swered that  Christ  had  less  will  of  his  own 
than  any  other  person  ever  had.  He  is  all  dis- 
solved. He  gives  free  passage  to  the  power 
of  God. 


THEOLOGY 

The  old  dogmas  of  the  church  are  crude  and 
somewhat  ugly  attempts  to  state  certain  mys- 
teries of  religious  experience  in  such  a  manner 
that  they  can  be  used  as  badges  of  organiza- 
tion work  and  as  political  whips.  The  semi- 
naries hammer  at  dogmas  as  if  they  outranked 
the  Gospels.  For  this  reason  we  dislike 
them.  After  we  have  once  had  experience  of 
the  truths  to  which  they  refer,  however,  we 
can  no  longer  regard  them  as  nonsense,  or  as 
hocus  pocus.  They  arc  attempts  to  de- 
fine things  which  Chri.st  expressed  by  his  life 
— i.  e.,  his  relation  to  God,  his  relation  to  men, 
his   mediation    in   every    sense   of   the   word. 

83 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

We  should  accept  these  dogmas  as  we  accept  a 
child's  drawing  of  a  haystack.  We  do  not 
doubt  the  existence  of  the  haystack. 


XI 

THE  LOVE  OF   GOD 

The  Love  of  God  is  the  only  thing  that 
there  is  enough  of  in  the  universe.  To  those 
in  whom  all  desires  have  become  merged  in 
this  love,  it  is  the  explanation  of  all  sentiment. 
It  is  all  things — consolation,  ambition,  hap- 
piness, the  love  of  others,  the  only  thing  we 
can  give  to  our  children,  our  aim  and  our  ful- 
filment— life  itself. 


XII 


MOODS 

Do  nothing  either  to  embrace  your  mood 
or  to  oppose  it.  Say  to  crossness.  Prevail  if 
thou  list.  Make  no  effort ;  for  all  effort  shuts 
the  door  against  new  life.  Life  comes  neither 
through  affirmation  nor  through  negation  but 
through  waiting.    Let  God  then  execute  him- 


NOIES   ON   RELIGION 

self  in  all  the  world ;  for  all  our  strength  is  to 
do  evil.  The  key  to  all  Jewish  thought  is  this : 
that  you  make  no  endeavor  to  understand  it. 
If  there  were  to  be  a  single  text  set  on  the 
outside  of  the  Bible  it  should  be,  I  waited  for 
the  Lord. 

XIII 
HORACE 

Horace  shows  us  the  Sabine  peasant 
woman,  the  poorest  and  humblest  of  living 
mortals,  standing  with  palms  uplifted  to  deity. 
How  many  of  us  are  so  well  acquainted  with 
the  body's  language  of  piety? 


XIV 

SPEECH    AND   SILENCE 

There  is  an  apparent  implication  in  the  New 
Testament  that  a  man  can  have  faith  if  he 
wants  it.  Christ  rebukes  people  for  having  Ht- 
tle  faith.  The  jjassages  in  which  He  does  so 
must  be  taken  as  part  of  His  teaching.  His 
reproaches  convey  a  powerful  stimulation, 
whose  process  we  cannot  follow.  The  same  is 
true  of   I  lis  denunciations.      It  seems  al)sur(l 

8S 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

to  abuse  any  one  for  any  reason ;  and  yet  the 
righteous  indignation  at  the  bottom  of  certain 
kinds  of  abuse  does  good.  A  whirlwind  of 
seraphic  influence  is  behind  it.  Neither  speech 
nor  silence  is  important.  If  you  speak  with 
the  power  of  God,  the  power  of  God  will  be 
expressed.  If  you  keep  silence  with  the  power 
of  God,  the  power  of  God  will  be  expressed. 

XV 

EAST   AND   WEST 

The  sacred  books  of  the  East  (I  mean  the 
Hebrew  writings)  have  been,  as  we  have  seen, 
poison  to  the  West.  And  yet  a  kind  of  heal- 
ing poison,  too ;  for  the  Europe  that  has  been 
casting  off  the  Papacy  during  the  last  four 
hundred  years  is  very  different  from  the 
Europe  which  accepted  the  Papacy  a  thou- 
sand years  before.  Perhaps  we  are  drenched 
enough  and  the  first  fit  is  over.  Perhaps  we 
are  become  so  strong  in  our  veins  and  bowels 
that  we  can  understand  the  Bible,  even  the 
New  Testament  without  being  turned  into 
bigots  or  devils  through  contact  with  the  su- 
perior wisdom  of  Asia.  The  truth  seems  to 
be  that  the  Hebraic  view  as  to  the  nature  of 
life  is  being  kneaded  into  humanity  gradually 
and  in  the  course  of  thousands  of  years. 

86 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

XVI 

THE   PORCHES   TO   THE  TEMPLE   OF   TRUTH 

There  are  three  porches  to  the  Temple  of 
Truth,  and  all  of  them  lead  to  the  same  ro- 
tunda ;  the  porch  of  Love,  the  porch  of  Intel- 
lect, and  the  porch  of  Character. 

The  man  of  strong  feelmg  understands  God. 
He  assents  without  need  of  kissing  the  Book: 
he  knows  more  than  his  teachers.  The  man 
of  Intellect  on  the  other  hand  has  worked 
out  some  theory.  It  may  seem  rigid  and  sense- 
less to  another,  but  to  him  it  is  a  bastion  of  the 
infinite.  He  will  die  for  it.  Lastly  comes  the 
man  of  Conscience,  the  good  citizen.  This 
man  does  not  live  in  the  regions  of  emotion: 
neither  can  he  give  you  a  reason  of  much 
depth.  But  he  knows  how  to  act.  Now  of 
these  three,  he  that  loves  becomes  the  saint, 
he  that  thinks  becomes  the  prophet,  and  he 
that  acts  becomes  the  hero. 

Love  feels  the  currents  of  force,  intellect 
perceives  them,  conscience  obeys  them.  All 
three  are  servants  of  force  and  bow  down 
before  it.  They  are  directed  and  used  by  it: 
they  arc  merged  and  embodied  into  it.  In 
their  fainter  forms  the  identity  of  those  three 

87 


NOTES   ON   RELIGION 

modes  of  life  is  not  perceived;  but  in  the 
blossoming  perfection  of  each  their  identity 
becomes  plain.  You  may  call  them  tempera- 
ments if  you  will — the  saint  or  lover,  the 
prophet  (or  artist)  and  the  hero. 

These  three,  then,  enter  by  different  portals 
into  the  Temple  where  pours  the  unimaginable 
Power,  which  is  to  them  (as  it  were)  stillness 
and  silence.  Instead  of  death,  through  the 
shock  of  this  power  they  receive  life;  and  as 
the  three  children  in  the  fiery  furnace  walked 
unharmed,  being  united  with  the  fourth  pres- 
ence that  moved  within  the  blast,  so  these 
accordant  souls  become  lost  in  the  power  be- 
hind them,  which  pours  immortally  through 
them  into  us  and  into  all  humanity,  taking  up 
all  men  in  itself  by  reason  of  the  continuity 
of  life.  Such  a  thing  is  man,  that  when  we 
have  begun  to  perceive  the  divinity  of  his  life 
we  have  nowhere  to  leave  off;  we  find  that 
there  is  no  part  of  him  which  is  not  inspired 
and  we  must  regard  him  as  a  form  and  por- 
tion of  Deity. 

All  of  us  live  in  the  swirl  and  terrible  suc- 
tion of  this  great  whirlpool.  Buddha  in  his 
contemplation  and  Mozart  in  his  music  do  no 
more  than  submit  to  it.  They  go  round  with 
the  stream.  And  their  non-resistance  draws  us 
in  behind  them. 

88 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

XVII 

SACRIFICE   AND    BURNT   OFFERINGS 

The  practice  of  Christ's  teaching  is  easy; 
for  while  you  are  waiting  to  begin  you  are 
already  under  way.  On  the  rack,  in  the 
school-room ;  in  society,  in  solitude ;  in  books, 
in  conduct ;  waking  and  sleeping  you  have  but 
to  give  way  to  God's  power,  to  give  up,  to 
accept,  to  expect  nothing,  to  be  satisfied  that 
the  problem  is  being  solved  and  the  truth 
advanced  and  behold  you  become  through  this 
very  self-surrender  a  part  of  the  solution  it- 
self. 

Baptism,  the  Lord's  Prayer  and  the  Lord's 
Supper  are  the  whole  ritual  of  Christianity.  I 
cannot  find  in  the  New  Testament  any  other 
instruments  of  piety,  any  regimen  or  scheme 
of  devotion,  any  priesthood  or  altar.  Each  soul 
is  left  to  adopt  its  own  devotions  and  prac- 
tices. As  for  Christ's  own  practices  we  are 
obliged  to  guess  them.  He  enjoins  prayer, 
l)raycr  and  fasting,  watching;  he  discourages 
vain  repetitions ;  but  leaves  all  in  general 
terms.  No  form  of  service  was  set  up,  noth- 
ing laid  down  categorically  as  a  gate  to  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven.     Christ  seems  to  have 

89 


NOTES   ON    RELIGION 

regarded  every  man  as  a  great  saint,  who 
needed  no  aids  to  devotion.  The  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  was  within  the  man  and  would  dis- 
close its  own  teaching  in  its  own  time.  Christ 
teaches  us  to  regard  one  moment  in  life  as  like 
the  next.  His  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  always 
present.  There  are  no  porticos  and  approaches 
to  it. 

The  steps  which  people  lay  with  so  much 
expense  to  temples — always  lead  up  sooner  or 
later  to  brambles  and  ruin.  But  this  temple  of 
Christ's  which  has  no  visible  portals  is  in- 
destructible. Nothing  was  ever  so  abstract  as 
this  idea.  Time  cannot  get  at  it  to  destroy  it. 
The  truths  of  Christ  are  like  fish  that  live  in 
the  veil  of  the  waterfall  and  are  as  active  as 
the  stream.  They  elude  the  net.  And  this 
Kingdom,  which  does  actually  exist,  is  shown 
and  opened  to  us  more  effectively  by  the  ellip- 
tical sayings  of  Christ  and  the  accidental  anec- 
dotes about  him  than  ever  could  have  been 
done  through  any  ritual  or  theology.  Thus 
the  practice  of  Christianity  is  easy. 

XVIII 

MAXIMS 

Any  proverbial  wisdom  has,  as  it  were,  a 
range  and  habitat  of  its  own.     The  Book  of 

90 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

Proverbs,  Pascal's  Pensees,  La  Rochefou- 
cauld's Maxims, — each  implies  a  social  world. 
But  the  words  of  Christ  dissolve  the  whole 
fabric  of  society.  They  subtract  the  world 
and  make  you  walk  invisible.  The  bywords 
of  Christ  are  larger  than  morality,  larger  than 
mankind.  Rub  the  ring  and  you  are  in  a  soli- 
tude and  are  possessed  by  the  power  that  turns 
the  wheels  behind  all  things.  These  little 
winged  sparks  destroy  the  visible  universe  and 
reduce  all  to  Ether  and  Force  once  more. 


XIX 

THE  ONE  THING    NEEDFUL 

Science  and  medicine  would  divide  man  into 
compartments,  as :  the  will,  the  reason,  the 
memory,  the  stomach,  the  nerves,  the  body,  the 
inside,  the  outside.  But  we  are  all  one  thing, 
one  piece  of  indivisible  humanity ;  and  no  por- 
tion can  be  reached  without  touching  the 
whole,  no  portion  best  influenced  except 
through  the  whole.  The  mind  will  not  suffer 
partitioning.  Psychology  withers  under  in- 
spection, and  we  are  thrown  back  upon  the 
gigantic  old  questions  of  mctaphysic, — concep- 
tions symbolic  and  universal,  whose  meanings 

91 


NOTES    ON   RELIGION 

we  grow  into  with  the  years.  Many  of  the 
sayings  of  Christ  steer  us  towards  these  poles 
of  thought. 

His  "one  thing  needful"  is  always  some 
form  of  submission, — submission  to  natural 
law,  to  truth,  to  apparent  failure,  to  ignorance. 
By  it  we  are  submerged,  consoled,  unified. 
Through  it  we  become  skeptical  as  to  all  other 
knowledge  except  this  knowledge;  for  the 
metes  and  bounds  of  our  old  thought  are  daily 
obliterated  by  the  waters  of  life.  Through 
this  conviction  of  ignorance  comes  our  wis- 
dom; through  this  abandonment  of  all  search 
come  our  discoveries;  through  this  sleep,  our 
strength.  There  is  no  other  release  from  the 
chains  of  customary  thought  except  this  depo- 
sition of  all  chains  in  a  willingness  to  become, 
as  it  were,  nothing. 

The  Oriental  groped  for  this  idea  of  self- 
lessness, and  found  it  in  annihilation.  But  the 
Oriental  is  not  quite  ingenuous;  he  wants  to 
discover  a  law  of  nature  in  order  to  make  use 
of  it.  By  his  crudity  of  attack  and  his  dog- 
matism,— by  attempting  to  understand  what 
cannot  be  understood, — he  turns  light  into 
darkness.  Yet  the  Orientals  were  on  the 
right  track  as  to  annihilation, — as  a  man  is  on 
the  right  track,  who,  finding  the  right  door, 
shuts  it  instead  of  opening  it. 

92 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

XX 

KNOWLEDGE   AND   SUFFERING 

We  must  see  with  relaxed  eyes  and  under- 
stand, as  it  were,  in  our  sleep,  or  we  shall  be 
deceived  by  life.  What  great  souls  have  I 
known  who  were  cut  off  from  knowledge  by 
the  attempt  to  grasp  what  cannot  be  grasped 
but  must  be  endured. 

"Zeus,"  says  /Eschylus,  "set  mortals  on  the 
road  to  wisdom  by  enacting  as  a  fixed  law  that 
knowledge  cometh  through  suffering." 

The  power  to  suffer  is  the  power  to  help. 
Unless  an  idea  besieges  us  we  cannot  resign  it. 
When  we  are  victims,  then  we  conquer.  When 
we  are  slaves  to  compassion,  torn  by  concern, 
held  to  suffering  by  the  fact  that  some  matter 
has  become  a  part  of  ourselves, — at  such  times 
we  are  in  league  with  power,  and  the  universe 
obeys  our  prayer.  It  obeys  prayer;  but  rules 
all  else.  Unless  the  problem  be  importunate 
you  cannot  solve  it  by  sleep.  The  child  must 
be  in  your  heart  before  you  bless  it.  The 
arrow  that  pierces  you  gives  you  your  power 
to  heal.  The  discovery  of  this  law  makes  the 
saint :  but  there  are  those  who  do  not  under- 
stand it,  yet  practice  it.     We  are  all  closely  in 

93 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

contact  with  the  totality  of  human  woe:  it 
presses  upon  us.  But  to  have  the  mind  to  see 
this,  the  heart  to  feel  it,  the  courage  to  accept 
it  and  the  constitution  to  bear  the  consequences 
was  given  only  to  Christ. 

XXI 

THE   INDIVIDUAL 

The  individual  is  an  illusion.  There  is  no 
such  thing  in  nature  as  an  individual.  Man  is 
merely  a  running  knot  in  force,  an  eddy  in  a 
stream, — a  very  complex  eddy, — the  entrances 
and  issues  of  him  being  unthinkable,  his  con- 
tractions, enlargements,  gyrations,  subsidences, 
and  transformations  being  forms  of  spirit- 
force,  whose  end  and  whose  beginning  are 
alike  unimaginable.  In  order  to  talk  of  man 
at  all  we  must  (one  might  say)  forget  the 
facts  and  speak  in  parables.  This  we  do  easily 
enough,  the  danger  being  lest  we  forget  them 
too  absolutely  and  come  to  believe  that  our 
metaphors  are  truth  itself. 

The  images  of  the  New  Testament,  homely 
as  they  are,  keep  us  in  the  forge  with  the  di- 
vine fire  playing  through  us.  They  disclose  its 
workings  and  make  us  feel  its  presence,  but 
do  not  define  or  belittle  us.  They  do  not  in- 
terrupt the  current. 

94 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

XXII 
MIRRORS 

The  projections  of  our  personality  are  inter- 
mingled in  space.  It  was  with  regard  to  this 
sort  of  existence  that  Christ  said  of  children 
that  their  angels  do  continually  look  upon  the 
face  of  my  Father.  The  child  is  at  play  and 
is  very  likely  a  bad  child ;  and  yet  to  Christ's 
eyes  he  wears  a  blazing  reflection  of  God  in 
his  face.  So  also  grown  people  carry  veiled 
mirrors  within  them ;  and  indeed  death  ensues 
when  these  mirrors  are  cracked  or  become  to- 
tally dark. 

XXIII 
DEUS   ABSCONDITUS 

Does  a  man  believe  in  a  personal  God  ?  It 
is  because  he  feels  God  operating  upon  his 
own  personality.  Some  men  find  God  through 
solitude,  some  through  the  Bible,  or  through 
grief.  Perhaps  sickness  has  shut  off  the  oxy- 
gen of  life  from  the  lungs  of  consciousness, 
and  then,  through  the  action  of  recovery,  the 
process  and  mode  of  Life  is  revealed. 

95 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

So  also  it  is  a  common  thing  before  oncom- 
ing death  for  a  man  to  receive  the  influx  and 
discovery  of  life.  He  has  been  ill, — all  but 
dead, — when,  for  a  few  moments,  all  the  fuel 
in  him  is  summoned  for  a  final  blaze  of  life. 
He  has  his  vision  of  truth ;  the  flame  burns 
brightly  for  a  moment  and  then  the  ashes  fall 
together.  Most  men  learn  through  exhaus- 
tion what  a  few  happy  souls  are  taught 
through  the  fulness  of  life  that  is  in  them. 
As  a  rule  a  man  must  be  hurt  by  the  poisons 
of  the  world,  he  must  be  defeated  and 
worn  out  before  he  will  keep  quiet.  At  last, 
when  he  is  too  weak  to  speak,  he  is  silent.  He 
hears  now  for  the  first  time  the  sounds  which 
his  own  voice  has  drowned  before.  Now  he 
listens.    This  is  a  natural  process. 

God  is  a  hidden  God,  because  men  cannot 
pull  open  each  others'  petals  or  invent  a  way 
of  finding  Him.  The  disclosure  is  always  by 
a  miracle.  A  bell  rings  and  shows  us  how 
near  we  are  to  the  center  of  all  things. 


XXIV 
THE   CONTEMPLATIVE   LIFE 

Mental  detachment  is  the  beginning  of  in- 
tellect, and  aloofness  of  power.    The  seers  saw 

96 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

this,  and  brought  in  the  life  of  retirement  and 
contemplation.  But  the  seers  by  this  artifice  do 
no  more  than  split  up  their  own  consciousness, 
and  make  life  dual.  Life  itself  is  unitary.  The 
practical  and  the  mystical  in  it  are  inseparable. 
The  mystic  should  not  renounce  the  world,  but 
accept  it.  Our  metaphysical  consent  to  all 
things  leads  to  an  aloofness  like  that  which 
the  recluse  sought  in  the  desert.  This  aloof- 
ness is  constantly  being  broken  in  upon  by 
bolts  from  the  active  world.  We  take  part  in 
practical  matters  before  we  mean  to.  We  be- 
lie our  faith  in  a  thousand  ways  at  every  mo- 
ment. We  are  constantly  being  dipped  in  the 
flood  of  present  things,  and  then  being  with- 
drawn and  set  on  a  mountain-top  to  dry. 
Hundreds  of  times  in  a  day  do  the  gleams  of 
the  greater  life  flash  through  us  by  contact 
with  the  lesser ;  and  instead  of  being  stupefied 
or  enslaved  by  practical  things  we  are  more 
and  more  freed  from  their  dominion.  The 
scheme  to  catch  truth  in  the  desert  is  a  dreary 
failure ;  and  the  ambition  of  the  anchorite 
shuts  as  many  doors  to  truth  as  do  the  love  of 
money  or  the  struggle  for  existence. 

There  is  a  dualism  in  the  language  of  Christ. 
He  contrasts  the  inner  and  outer,  His  own 
Kingdom  with  the  Kingdom  of  this  world,  etc. 
He  resorts  to  this  symbolism  of  duality  in  ex- 

97 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

plaining  the  nature  of  our  life, — our  life 
which  is  unitary,  indivisible.  The  need  of  a 
dual  symbolism  comes  from  the  negativity  at 
the  bottom  of  our  existence.  We  seem  to 
live ;  but  we  ourselves  do  nothing :  God  causes 
us  to  live.  This  negativity  in  fact,  and  posi- 
tiveness  in  appearance  make  it  necessary  to 
resort  to  dual  symbols  in  picturing  our  condi- 
tion. But  Life  is  only  one,  and  the  law  of  life 
is  one.  The  horrid  perversion  by  which  Chris- 
tians try  to  gain  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  by 
leaving  the  world,  is  due  to  a  literal-minded 
interpretation  of  mysteries, — a  miscomprehen- 
sion of  the  whole  matter.  The  sort  of  mysti- 
cism which  believes  in  segregating  religion  into 
one  portion  of  life  is  an  attempt  at  a  short-cut 
to  piety.  The  Jewish  prophets,  and  Christ 
himself,  were  men  of  the  market-place. 


XXV 

WHAT    IS    A    RELIGION? 

A  religion  is  a  mode  of  power  passing 
through  men,  occupying  one  man  and  another 
man.  No  two  are  alike.  The  founder  of  any 
religion  is  more  perfectly  possessed  than  his 
followers.    They  hark  back  to  him,  he  to  God. 

98 


NOTES    ON    RELIGION 

The  religions  are  all  related,  and  have  touched 
one  another  and  passed  into  one  another ;  and 
these  great  personalities  or  founders  are  the 
gateways  and  focuses  through  which  religions 
pass.  How  few  great  lights  there  have  been, 
and  how  many  small  lights !  We  too,  you  and 
I,  are  half-power  men  and  quarter-power  men, 
faint  luminosities  and  adumbrations.  We  are 
full  of  cross-lights  and  contradictions, — full  of 
the  classics,  of  Romanticism,  of  love.  How 
many  glints  and  shimmers  from  all  ages  shine 
in  us !  And  somewhere  behind  all  the  clouds 
that  surround  us  glows  the  great  Sun  of 
Qirist,  some  of  whose  power  is  in  us.  We 
cannot  help  being  part  of  this  light;  we  share 
in  the  transmission  of  it  whether  we  would 
or  no.  To  do  so  is  part  of  our  destiny,  like  our 
date,  our  hemisphere,  the  color  of  our  skin. 

Christ's  teaching  conveys  one  constant  idea, 
— the  identity  of  all  life  with  all  power.  "I 
and  my  Father  are  one."  "I  am  the  vine:  ye 
are  the  branches."  "Ye  are  members  one  of 
another."  This  thought  solves  every  question 
in  morals.  Why,  for  instance,  do  we  approve 
the  unrecorded  heroic  deed,  or  condemn  the 
secret  sin  of  an  unknown  man?  iiecausc  we 
are  part  of  each.  Symbolically?  Yes:  but 
also  actually,  and  in  fact.  Is  the  occurrence 
in  the  past?     There  is  no  i)ast.     In  the  dis- 

99 


NOTES    ON   RELIGION 

tance?  There  is  no  distance.  "Inasmuch  as 
ye  have  done  it  unto  the  least  of  these  ye  have 
done  it  unto  me."  Christ  teaches — or  rather 
shows  by  his  actions — that  the  other  world,  the 
world  our  instinct  craves,  is  in  operation, — not 
a  thing  dreamed  and  forgotten,  or  a  thing 
promised  and  to  come,  but  an  actuality.  This 
is  very  startling,  and  much  too  extraordinary 
to  be  credited.  Men  therefore  move  the  King- 
dom of  Heaven  off  and  defer  it  to  the  next 
world.  But  the  Lord's  Prayer  petitions  for 
something  immediately,  this  afternoon,  now. 
The  Lord's  Prayer  is  the  vanishing-point  of 
human  endeavor  and  the  vortex  through  which 
the  Might  of  the  Universe  pours  in. 


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